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.