Practice last night was awesome (technically today is Thursday, but I started writing this Wednesday morning, so let’s go with that). I was really expecting it to be super cruddy because I just started my period, but after 5 minutes on skates I completely forgot about it. Because we’re in the off season most practices only end up having handful of girls show up to them, so last night we had 8. We started out by splitting off in to two groups of 4, with a drill of doing 5 sets of 5 timed laps. First we would do our laps and then the other group would do theirs. After the first set of five, I was surprisingly winded and felt like an idiot. The other girls were too, but they had legitimate excuses (one had just come from a workout and another was just getting over laryngitis. We did three, took a water break, did our fourth, and then did one set skating the opposite direction. My times were 54, 52, 50, 54, and 60.
After that we skated 5 laps backwards (some of the girls did 10 laps because many of them are awesome at skating backwards, so they did 10 in the time it took me to do 5, lol), and followed it up by skating forward a bit and then just turning around go backwards and turning around again (to get us comfortable with turning around, I think). Then I got to do something I’d never done before: toe stop runs!
In the drill we would skate backwards for a bit and when our coach blew the whistle we would go onto our toe stops and try to walk six steps (it would progress into running, but for the first few times it was just walking on toe stops). The first time I had no idea what I was doing and I fell, so one of the girls said to pretend like I was walking on high heels. I got it pretty well, I think. I definitely want practice it more because it feels weird and unsteady, but it’s doable.
The next drill we did was going out of bounds and trying to re-enter play quickly. When our coach blew the whistle we had to skate out of bounds, tomahawk stop, and quickly get back in. In the next one we would go out of bounds on a knee and then get back up and in bounds. The last one was tiring, but fun. When the coach blew the whistle we went down on our belly outside of the track and had to get up quickly. I’m still not as speedy as I want to be, but it’s a ton less flailing than it used to be and only one time it took me 3 seconds to get up (it was the last time).
Finally we did some scrimmage practice. We did some 4 on 4 (not enough people to have jammers) practicing different blocking strategies. Then we did some 3 on 3 with 2 jammers. I gave a few good hits and a TON of encouragement, tips, and compliments. Even when it was my turn to wear the jammer panty I was complimented (I didn’t do well, but the fact that I just kept going and going without giving up was good). Sometimes when I do well at jamming, I think that I might be a jammer in a real bout some day. If I work on my speed and endurance a lot, it might just happen (although I should learn to block first, lol). Also, I got a weird new injury: rink rash of the nipple! I was hit when I was jamming (she was out of play and ended up in the penalty box, so yay) and when I fell I slid on the floor and I swear my nipple hurt so damn bad. Apparently it happens to everyone, so I guess I’m proud to be part of the club?
I’m excited for Thursday practice (the last before the scrimmage!!) and I hope I keep improving. :D
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