Practice was originally canceled on Tuesday, 11/29 because the rink was unavailable. The reason it was unavailable was because it was being recoated. Luckily, it dried fast enough so they allowed us to practice that night. To be honest, I couldn’t feel much of a difference. My t-stops made sounds (I am notoriously bad at t-stopping, so this was a first) and it was harder to knee slide, but other than that it felt the same to me. More experienced skaters could feel the difference, I think.
Anyway, practice was okay on Tuesday. I did just fine, but not great or horrible. Honestly, I would rather fail spectacularly at something and work to improve it than just do an okay job at practice. When we left I didn’t feel exhausted or exhilarated, which is very unusual. I thought about it on Wednesday and realized that I really hadn’t skated as hard as I could have. We did a drill where we just did crossovers only around and around the track. I know I could have pushed myself to go faster. All in all, I was just disappointed with myself and how I didn’t give it everything I had. I decided that on Thursday I would push myself to exhaustion and if I wasn’t sore after practice then I did something wrong.
I’m happy to say that I didn’t do anything wrong. I was worn out and absolutely exhilarated after practice on Thursday. There were only 7 of us there (included the fresh meat coach and our head ref) and worked hard. I found out shortly after I got there that we would be doing an endurance practice. Rather than jogging for five minutes we put our skates on and did ten sprinting laps around the whole rink. That was followed by some planks, burpees (if you’ve never done burpees on skates, don’t do it, it is scary as hell), and stretching.
Then it all becomes a blur from there. We did all sorts of pace line drills (I still have a lot of trouble figuring out if I should be calling “inside” or “outside” and it makes me ridiculously anxious when we do pace line drills, which happens at almost every practice) including weaving forward, backward, lateral hops, hip bumps, pushing through, hip whips, arm whips, back whips (I’ll get to that in a second), and all of that again and again. Usually when we do pace lines we do an exercise once and move on to the next one. Thursday we did everything at least twice, sometimes three or four times.
This part may have happened before or after the pace line (I’m pretty sure it was after). We got in a line and did laps, our coach for the night said we would be skating hard for 15 minutes solid. First we did two laps at pack speed followed by one sprinting lap. We did it that way about 3 or 4 times before the faster people went to the outside of the track while one girl, our coach for the evening, and I did it on the inside. The girl with us in the middle of the track had to leave (she has sports related asthma and her inhaler wasn’t helping), so I joined in with the people on the outside.
We did another 2 rounds of 2 slow, 1 sprint before changing it to 1 slow, 2 sprint. While the other people were able to keep up with the line, I was about 10 feet behind the whole time. I think it was about 10 minutes into the sprinting drill that we started doing pushing and pulling. First I pushed the whole group around the outside of the track, and after everyone else had gone, I pulled everyone else around the track. It feels like walking through the worst mud when you’re pulling 5 people behind you. One of the hardest parts was staying in derby stance the entire time we did the pushing and pulling.
After we finished up that part we went to get water and our coach that evening said we just skated the equivalent of an entire half hour of a bout (minus the intense hits you’d be getting). I felt insanely proud of myself for not quitting or giving in, or even slowing down. I knew that if I just kept going that it would get over eventually. Think of Dory from Finding Nemo, “Just keep swimming, just keep swimming, swimming, swimming.”
I can’t even remember what happened for the rest of practice. All I know is that when I left I was feeling amazing and unbelievably exhausted.
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