If you feel like laps are your worst enemy, maybe they are.

When I was still fresh meat, desperate to pass my laps, I recall approaching my trainers and telling them that my legs felt as though they were seizing up. It started as cramps in my feet and traveled upward, the excruciating pain becoming stiffness and the feeling that I had no control over my own body. It started after just a few laps and intensified until I stopped but, once the laps were over and I stretched a little, it went away like nothing had even been wrong. Well. They looked at me like this was the most absurd thing they had ever heard.

So, I decided it must be me since it didn’t sound familiar to anyone I was telling. I did everything I knew to do. I started running to take cardio fatigue out of the equation. I paid for private lessons with one of our coaches to work on my technique. I lost 30 pounds. I tried different combinations of wheels and bearings thinking it might help but nothing ever did and I decided that something in my legs was just too weak* and I hadn’t found the right thing to make them strong enough. Since laps were the only time I felt this way, my theory made sense to me.

Through the strength of my will (and some important encouragement), I passed my laps after 15 months of trying and, for awhile, I put it out of my head. I had new things to focus on, new experiences to gain, and I felt like the laps would just get easier but they never did. Wanting to up my game, I renewed my mission to solve this problem and consulted with a personal trainer to help me overcome it once and for all.

“Sounds like you have compartment syndrome,” he said. What? I had heard about this! Tera Bites had surgery for it before we met – but her story about the great lengths she went to in convincing her doctor to check it out made it sound rare or improbable so it never occurred to me that it could be the problem I was having, too.

I saw a sports medicine doctor and he agreed that my experience was consistent with chronic exertional (also called exercise induced) compartment syndrome of my lower legs. He explained that it often onsets with a repetitive activity; in my case, just plain skating in circles. It isn’t a problem in gameplay because I’m doing other things with my feet and legs. Since I recover from the pain pretty quickly and, in my entire life it only impacts me while I skate laps, my doctor does not recommend surgery. If it got worse or more limiting, I would push him to do it but I am 42 and want to make the most of the derby time I have. 

What is this Compartment Syndrome? It’s a condition where your muscles are too large for the fascia that contain them. To give you a gross but effective visual, think about when you eat chicken. There is a thin, white membrane surrounding the different muscles you eat. That is the fascia. When that fascia is too constricting, you build up pressure during exercise that can cut off the oxygen supply and cause permanent muscle and nerve damage. Why does it only happen for me during laps since, clearly, my lower legs are at work all the time in derby? It’s kind of like priming a pump. 

I’m ridiculously stubborn and I’ve been in denial about it ever since. Recently, after warm-ups at practice involving at least 8 straight minutes of just laps, I never really recovered through the rest of practice. I still hurt a lot the next day and I was afraid I had done the permanent damage I had been warned about. I decided to do the smart thing for me and stepped down from my spot on the B-team because it required me to (and I wanted to) push myself harder than I could afford to push.

I am sharing this detailed account because I hope it might help someone get to this answer faster than I did.  That said, I am not a doctor and I am not giving any advice other than, “If any of this sounds familiar to you, please see a sports medicine specialist.” They can tell you what’s up and give you advice. Mine said I can continue to play but I needed to listen to my body so that’s what I’ve finally decided to do. There is a lot of pressure to be a beast in derby and all of us risk broken bones and concussions every time we step onto the track but there is not a lot of empathy for having limitations much less accepting them. 

It’s really hard to firmly say I can’t when this sport has done so much to convince me that I absolutely can. 

I’m lucky because I have a wonderful derby wife and an amazing real life husband who cushioned my fall with their love and support. Leadership on both sides of my transition were kind and understanding and my J-Villains welcomed me back with enthusiasm. I am happier with “my secret” out because I feel more empowered to manage my condition. 

*I am risking my credibility in admitting this since I could probably lift a car with my legs but this really is what I was thinking!

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.