Victories

A couple of super cool things happened to me at practice last week.

If you’ve been following me since the beginning of this derby journey (or if you’ve read back to my earlier posts), you’ll know that I spent a very long time trying to pass my timed laps. I had my basic skills down well enough, I had scrimmaged a little at practice, but those laps really held me back. A combination of bad form and extra weight and poor endurance definitely contributing factors, I eventually overcame it but not before about 15 months of fighting. Sometime in there, WFTDA raised the count to 27 rather than 25 laps in 5 minutes and it was one on those moments when I was ready to give in. Fortunately, my league decided that 25 was good enough for our lowest level of competition and we are allowed to pass to home team and c-team play once 25 in 5 is achieved. I say fortunately primarily because that decision kept me from quitting.

Wednesday night was partially a freshmeat practice and our trainers start the new girls on laps right away – so they know what 25 laps feels like and what 5 minutes feels like. They are allowed to try them at pretty much every practice and, once they make it, they are considered passed for their skills test. This is a huge improvement from my own training where I didn’t get to try it for 2 whole months and then only once a month thereafter. Pass or fail (in my case, repeatedly failing), I had to wait another month to try again. Back then, freshmeat practice never had the benefit of the full track. How can you possibly figure this out while stuck in the kiddie pool at the end of the floor?

Now that you’re up to speed (see what I did there?), I will get to the cool thing that happened. I’ve been having a lot of foot pain in my boots and, between that and having so many really fresh freshmeat girls on the track, I planned to take my laps easy. Even taking it easy, with my right foot on fire – I wasn’t out of breath and wouldn’t you know it? I did 25 laps in 5 minutes. There was a time when I believed I would never achieve that time at all much less have it come easy. It was a huge victory I didn’t even know was significant to me until it happened.

On Thursday, our coaches had us working on hockey stops/power slides. This was new stuff for me and I had a kind of scared and kind of self-conscious excited dread as I tried it. We started with cutting through some cones and discovered that, if you did it properly, you were executing the form required for the stop. The first time I felt my wheels thumping across the floor and they made that sound, I knew it was clicking for me – and after what felt like 250 non-hockey stops and a few falls (hey, if you don’t fall on a new skill, you’re not trying hard enough, right?) – I did one really pretty one with the awesome noise and everything. It doesn’t matter that I only did one because I did one! If I did one, I know I can do more. I loved this practice. I spend most of my time improving something I’ve already tried and it is rare when I get to try something new. It was also cool to see that others were still working on this skill as I was pretty sure I was one of the only people who didn’t know how to do it.

It was a really successful week – not because I did anything particularly awesome but because I saw progress.