In my last post I was worried about my ankle. It swelled to an outrageous size all through Tuesday and I was planning on telling the fresh meat coach that I wasn't going to be able to skate. I checked my email before leaving work for practice and saw a reminder that we were meeting at Greenway rather than the rink since they had an event. I decided I would give skating a try and if I had trouble skating to where the trails started then I wouldn't skate.
Practice started with an hour long league meeting before we donned our skates. I laced up my skates and skated with the team. I was able to keep up much better than I had on Friday. In the end we only skated 3 miles before it got too dark to do anything else, so we packed it in. When I took off my skates I noticed that the swelling had gone down about 90%. So yes, healing powers of skating!
Thursday practice was great! One of the girls that has been in fresh meat with us was testing out. She's a former vet of the team and per the team's bylaws, she's eligible to test out of fresh meat after her 4th week (this was the 6th). So while we did our jog, stretching, and a few drills she was doing her minimum skills (she passed!). I'm excited for her, but kinda sad that she'll be leaving our small group (although we're halfway through, so the group won't last all that long).
We freshmeat were lucky enough to be able to do some drills with the vets. I'm kind of an idiot, because now I've sort of forgotten what they were because I waited so long to post about them, but I'll remember to the best of my ability.
The first one we did after our initial warm up laps was a paceline drill. As we skated in the paceline the very front person would skate ahead and pass the line on the outside and then skate around again to join them in the back. After that we worked with a partner on staying in the blocker's blind spot by weaving from side to side as well as some positional blocking and a bit of pushing.
After that we did a sort of "pass the panty" type of thing. Everyone was skating as a big giant pack and one person would be wearing the jammer panty, they would skate around the track, find holes through the pack (with no blocking - except on some we were told to make it hard for them) and on their second pass through the pack they would hand the jammer panty off to someone else and they would do the same. I ended up being the last one to get the jammer panty (IT FELT SO WEIRD TO TRY AND PUT IT ON WHILE I WAS SKATING!!) and as I was making my final pass through the pack someone yelled something like, "Shae wants to be a jammer, make it hard for her!" and EVERYONE THREW THEIR ARMS OUT TO BLOCK ME! I crouched low and went through on the inside. Just as an fyi - no, I do not want to be a jammer, she just wanted to make it hard for me, lol.
All of that was in about an hour and a half of our practice, and then freshies broke off to go do our normal thing. We did the normal falls with the addition of 180 knee slides and some plow stopping. We focused a lot on stopping for our part of the practice. We're all pretty good stopping with our right leg, but the left is a mess. I really need to figure out a way outside of practice that I can work on stopping with my left. About 10 minutes before practice ended we joined the rest of the team to do backwards laps. I fell 3 times, one of them forward! When I fell forward I got a large round of applause, lol. I am not awesome at backwards skating.
Today was a very different type of practice. First of all, our fresh meat coach wasn't there. After the meeting we had on Tuesday, I don't know if he just wasn't there or if he's not going to come back because of all of the main team coaching changes that are happening right now. I guess we'll see how Tuesday practice is.
As I said, it was very different than normal because our fresh meat coach wasn't there and there were only 2 freshies, 6 vets, our captain (who was leading the practice), and the team's head ref. Also, a couple of the ladies had gone to part of the matinee skate that happens before practice to drum up some interest in the league and the sport. Several people, including a bunch of kids, were allowed to hang back and watch us practice for a bit. Rather than doing our normal run and stretch we immediately geared up. We started with some warm up laps before forming a line for some paceline drills.
In the line we did: regular weaving, backwards weaving, butt swipes (you get in real close and swipe your butt across their lap/vag area), and hip whips (my first time trying them!). After that the vets did a little mock 3 on 3 scrimmage. Right as they were finishing up a jam the spectators left, so they ditched doing that since they never start practices with scrimmaging.
We got back into a line and did an exercise where we had to cut across from one side of the track to the other when a whistle was blown. Never having done this, I fell (of course) and it made the girl behind me fall. The tight paceline separated and practiced the actual movement involved. Once I got exactly how the lunge to the inside/outside worked, it became a lot easier. I really liked that one and want to try it some more!
The next one was getting from one side of the track to the other with *ominous music* lateral hops! Now, we've done lateral hops in fresh meat, but that was during off-skates training. Big surprise though - I didn't fall! Not even once! I think I did several good ones, a lot of mediocre ones, and one or two bad ones.
After that we worked with a partner and I did not do well, in my opinion. I didn't fully understand the drill and was a little lost. We combined the cutting movement and the butt swipe for blocking someone, but I think we were supposed to be passing them, and I wasn't passing my partner. I don't know. I felt like a bit of an idiot during this part (especially because my partner is an amazing skater with a lifetime of skating experience).
Rather than keep practicing that one on each other, our ref changed from skates to sneakers and got out a large hitting pad so we could practicing hitting it. We did some of the same butt swipe hits; none of my attempts were right. After that he held the pad to the side and we had to cut from one side of the track to the other to deliver a hit with our whole body. I think out of all of the ones I did, I landed 1 or 2 correctly. Kind of discouraging, but this was the first time the fresh meat practiced any type of hitting at all.
The next drill the vets were going to do was skate around the track and when a move was called they would do it (tomahawks, falls, stops, etc). We were pulled aside and worked with the skater I had partnered with before. She wanted to know what we had been taught to do and correct a few of our falls. Our knee falls were good, but we were falling a bit too hard (and me leaning a bit too far back) in our double knee falls. Our pornstars/superman falls were good, but our baseball slides were wrong. She showed us another way to do them, so we did one of two of those. The one we learned before was a bit harder than the new one. I don't mind either though.
We did some t-stop practice after that, and I came the closest I ever have to actually stopping with my left foot!! So yays, hopefully I'll keep improving! We did some plow stopping after that, not too much since we both had the basic concept down, it's just a matter of perfecting it. Then we did...TOMAHAWKS!
The other fresh meat girl has already been able to turn around (and around and around and around) since we started, so she got those really easy. As long as I think about the steps involved in turning around, I can kinda do them. So I was able to do 2 good, but very slow, tomahawk stops. I definitely want to practice the hell out of those! Then we did hockey stops. The same turn around as a tomahawk, but with one leg out in back. I did one good one of those, and definitely want to work on it (I need more work with the turn around rather than the stopping motion in both the hockey and the tomahawk). The captain announced that it was time to start picking up the track, but the skater that was with us wanted us to try some regular hopping. We hopped in place once, and then started rolling, doing 3 hops down one part of the rink, and then 3 hops down the next part. I am happy to say that I only fell once, and I knew exactly why I fell (put too much weight on the front of my skates rather than the middle). I was kinda bummed when that was the end of practice, because I was very excited at the new skills we were able to tackle today.
I've also decided to stop going to Monday night skate because I need more time for homework type stuff and this week I have two tests (also, I don't like spending money). On Monday I'm going to study and prepare for both tests and on Wednesday night I'll go ahead and take both of them. Right now I'm skating at practice Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday and then I will be doing trail skating on Friday and Sunday (except tomorrow since I'm going to Orlando in the early morning). After this coming week, I think I want to start doing zumba or another kind of cardio on Monday & Wednesday when I'm not skating.
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