Blech

Today was long. My manager kindly scheduled me at 1, so I was able to go to practice. I woke up and did not want to. But I knew that my derby wife would tell me to (even though she was asleep at that time, because it was like 5:30 where she was). So I got up and put on my leggings on.

Well then, I never got back to this blog post yesterday. Allow me to recall.

We did endurance practice, but it wasn't endurance like, "Ugh." It was endurance like, "This is endurance? Ok." K. Rye did it in a fun, self-guided way. The first drill we did was a sprint/core drill. We had whistles at every minute mark and we sprinted until the minute mark and then did either 10 push-ups or 20 sit-ups. This particular drill had my feet screaming. My arches were cramping so bad, I was nearly in tears. But I kept skating. After the drill, I was able to grab my insoles from my bag and that made all the difference. Some days, I need the insoles, some days I can't do it. Such is derby.

After that, we did the school bus/carpool drill. Thank you Rye for doing it in a fair way. She has the first person to get on the bus be the first person off. This means that the first person doesn't have to do all the laps. One of my dear teammates has been having a lot of leg pain, and has been getting treatments to help. They didn't seem to be helping her, so I tried to encourage her through the drill. It made me feel better about my own pain.

Then Rye had us stop, turn around, and do it non-derby direction. It took me a long time to adjust to crossovers with the 187 knee pads reverse-derby direction. In fact, that was the only thing that took any adjustment with them. I didn't know if I'd ever get the ability back. But I did, yay! Also I learned that I lace my left boot a little looser, which is fine for derby direction, but when that leg starts being the one picked up to cross over, it was a little wiggly.

Afterward Rye had us do 25 laps any way we wanted. The idea was clearly to sprint, but she opened up to us doing is backwards or reverse derby direction or whatever. Afterward, we were to do core and then go back out and do more laps. I did 25 staying as low as I could, like a jammer, but still keeping eyes forward so I could "map the pack." I collapsed for a second. Then after doing my core, I skated 25 laps backwards. After that, my poor newbie was leaving practice after a bad fall on her tush, so I went and hugged her. Hope your butt heals, Sonja!

I am glad I went to practice yesterday, but I hope that the next two nights of practice (scrimmage tonight) will not kill me. I think I will go foam roll and drink coffee.

TODAY!

I met Bonnie D. Stroir! Omigod!

More to come later. When I process it all.

Ok, so after several hours of obsessing over derby including:
1. Assessing my next gear purchase.
2. Getting excited about any wheel Atom has ever produced.
3. Shopping for skates I don't need.
4. Reading the blog of one of my new idols, Elektra-Q-Tion
and 5. Being upset that none of the blogs I follow have updated lately.

So, I've decided to stop being a jackass and post for all of you.

I will try to condense the amazingness that Bonnie shared with us. She has a lot of great metaphors, firstly. I love her sharks and seals theory. Basically the inside and outside lines are deep water where sharks (blockers) thrive. Seals (jammers) do best in shallow water, or the middle lane of the track.

She gave us a lot of good advice about energy too. There are a lot of personalities in derby and instead of trying to fit into the mold of what traditional strategy says we need to do, we should complement each other. If you're the anchor in a wall, it's your job to be the calm one.

She gave us lots of little strategies and then let us go on the track and play with them. In short bursts, we got to try them out. I felt like I had a lot of success implementing her ideas. I can't wait to put them into practice at scrimmage or in scrills.

Bonnie has a lot of ideas that are in direct contradiction with what we've all been taught. She maintains that being low has its time, but derby position is not always appropriate. She gave us a lot of help with juking which is totally awesome, because it's something I desire strongly to work on.

She also spent some time talking about the derby mental game. She talked us through the game From the Bench, On the Track, and From the Box. She had some great tips for calming down if it starts to get overwhelming. Her tips are to regulate your breathing and give yourself simple mental command.


After all this, I came home and read derby blogs and am now looking at gear. I found some used Antik MG-2s in my size. I am seriously considering Revenge plates. I would like to try the Atom Snap wheels.

Anyway, this is all a whole lot of derby and I've got practice in the morning, so I'm going to bed.

Good night, hope dreams of skates come to you!