So, on monday we had another practice. After the kickoff being so intense, it was weird having to wait a week before I was able to skate again. So, at practice on monday I felt really uncertain during warm-up. It was the weirdest experience. It felt like I couldn’t do anything. My crossovers were nonexistent and I didn’t dare picking up speed in fear of falling.
After warm-up, the first thing we started working on was crossovers. I continued to feel like a klutz, but after a while one of our teachers came and corrected my derby stance, and everything clicked in my head after that, and I was back to where I was last monday, skating-wise. I guess some practices will be harder than others, and I’m glad I got to experience how that feels like and that it is possible to snap out of it.
Next, we worked on the different stops. Plow-stop, T-stop and turn around toe stop. All of them are definitely getting somewhere. Not perfect any of them, but I’m pretty sure of what I need to do to improve them.
After that we worked on different falls. Falls are fun! And not very hard I think. Except for the 180 knee fall, which is still a little uncontrolled for me. And for the first time, we got to try a baseball slide. It really looked much harder than it was, but it’s still hard to do perfectly. When doing it at much higher speeds than we did, it’s really important to not get anything but you pads on the floor, and that requires good core strength. It’s almost supposed to look like the sideways plank exercise.
Last, we did a endurance exercise called the pyramid. We were paired up, and were supposed to push and drag or be pushed or dragged around the track first once, then twice and so on up to five times around the track, and then down again. It was really tiresome, but it was more the muscles in my lower back that killed me rather than my lack of endurance. Which is sort of comforting. Time to strengthen those lower back muscles!
On october 8th and 10th there will be a skill test, where we will be able to advance to level 1 (all fresh meat start on level 0), and the practices until then will mostly focus on the skills required to pass that test. Which is really basic stuff, but fun non the less.
Next practice, I WILL try to take at least one picture, as I know how discouraging it is to read a wall of text. I tried to steal a video from facebook of us freshmeats doing baseball slides, but didn’t figure out how to embed it on here. Ah, well.
My Roller Derby Adventure 