Another Practice Down

Last night was derby practice. Beginning Sunday, we start practicing two times per week. Four hours per week on skates, four hours of ass-busting work, four hours of flying around the rink listening to the Sex Pistols and trying to just stay on my feet and not look like an idiot. Loving every minute of it.

A typical practice (at least for our group, which is full of fresh meat) starts out with group stretching and maybe a warmup lap or two around the rink. Then we do a lengthy plank (ouch) and endurance squats (ouch ouch). After that, we’ve been moving on to basic skills practice. This week we worked on stopping (the t-stop you probably learned when you were little). I am surprisingly bad at it. One of the vets pointed out what I’m doing wrong, so I need to work on it. We practiced knee falls as well. This is another area I need work on. I can fall just fine (har), but I can’t scramble back up fast enough. And any time your hands are on the floor, you’re risking your fingers being run over by a skate. NO THANKS. After that, we practiced one footed jumps. Ack. Scary! The girls who were more comfortable with it took turns jumping over our jammer as she lay on the floor. I declined, as I’d rather not murder our jammer so early in the season. But I will get there.

Next up we did some endurance skating, where we’d take a knee fall and pop back up every time our captain blew the whistle. She blew that whistle a lot. It was exhausting, especially since I can barely get up from a fall! After THAT, we broke into small groups and practiced chasing each other. Then some pushups, wtf.

Then, we played a quick round of Blood and Thunder to get ourselves used to what a pack should look like, as well as how much distance we are allowed to have between us and still be considered a “pack.” These rules are confusing and I have a lot of studying to do. Anyway, Blood and Thunder is basically everyone against the jammer — everyone just tries to block her from getting through the pack. It was pretty fun, even though we were taking it easy on each other, mostly.

To end the night, we practiced “booty blocking,” something my big ass and I were probably born to do. With booty blocking, you basically stick your ass into the jammer when she’s behind you and slow down. You want to act like you’re sitting on her. It can slow a jammer to a crawl and she’ll have no way to get around you. I’m not good at slowing down quickly, so that’s a skill I need work on. But it was fun. We also practiced in groups of three — two people blocking and one person trying to jam past. I was able to jam past my two blockers when it was my turn, but we weren’t on the track, so I was out of bounds and able to take a big curve around them. Heh.

Anyway, last week I was so discombobulated when I left practice, I forgot my pads at the rink. This week I remembered my pads and forgot my mouthguard. I’m afraid I’m earning a reputation as a flake. Der. And lest you think I am getting good at this, I took two spectacular falls on my ass. And also crashed into the wall so hard that I knocked over the soft sideboard. Luckily, I was not the only person to do that, hee hee.

So that’s a typical evening in the life of fresh meat. Stay tuned.

Related posts:

1. A Discouraging Practice
2. Queen of the Rink
3. Strep + Me + HOT + Derby = Guh
4. And We All Roll On
5. Skating in the Hellmouth