New trick mastered!

One of the many reasons why I love this sport is because you can easily see yourself progress. Not every month but every week! Most of us have skated as a kid, wether it was on roller skates, inlines or iceskates (or all three) and when we were younger we tried new tricks all day. Who would dare to jump over the biggest ramp, the hole in the ice (oh yeah, I did that), who can turn the fastest or do the longest spin, who can perform the coolest stop, skate the longest on one leg or do the coolest onelegged trick? Having tried all those things over and over again when you were young has created a form of physical memory. I wouldn't call it muscle memory just because I'm not sure if that would hold that long (at least 20 years in my case), but it's at least very similar to it. That type of memory kicks in when you try new tricks that you were able to perform in ancient history. You still need to practice to get the trick down. I mean, you grew quite a bit since you were 10 and it's been a while, but the basics are there for you to adjust to the current situation by practicing. At least that's my little theory about  this.

A few weeks after I started practicing with the awesome Slaughters Daughters I could hardly skate half a lap on only my right foot while being pushed. Yesterday I could easily do two and now the distance was no longer limited by balance difficulties but by muscle endurance in my right leg. Yay!

I also managed to get the feeling back for doing crossovers while skating backwards. And I'm pretty sure that I managed to get this done because I used to do it on my hokeyskates when I was little. Of course I also managed to fall on my pretty little behind *cough* again, but at least I have less pain of that now than I did the first time round. Yay again!

I can really recommend this sport to any girl who is just slightly curious. Try it once. It will be hard, but you will also find that your body recognises some of it and after the first hour you will already have improved immensely!

Derby kisses,
Dutchess

Painkillers hmmm...

So last night I took a high dose of slow release perscription painkillers which I have to say are doing their job quite nicely. Will definitely take another dose of those tonight. I mean, it still hurts, but so much less than yesterday.

Tomorrow's training is a dedicated fresh meat training and I think I will take part in it. I'll try and stay away from falls, jumps and tackling exercizes and just do some easy rolling, some agility, to not lose the tiny amount of "feeling" I have at the moment and to slowly start training up the muscles around my knee again.

Derby kisses,
from a slightly better feeling Dutchess

AAAaaaargggghhhhh!!

I'm gonna cry soon. I really hope that this period of injury after injury will pass at some stage so that I can just train and play the game. Now that the pain in my knee has started to go down (I still couldn't do more than half an hour of training on it) the pain in my ribcage is getting more obvious. I hurt it on the same night as my knee by rolling over my arm during a barrel roll fall. So far it was an annoying pain that came up with heavy breathing, coughing and stabalising activity in my stomach and back muscles, but now it's hurting continuously, I hear clicks when I roll around on to my other side and the pain is almost unbearable when I move about or cough. I don't think the rib is broken but even if it is, the doc wont do anything. So all I can do is wait.. wait.. and then wait some more. I'm going nuts and fat due to not training (tried 45 mins of low intensity biking at the gym, but that left my knee hurting like crazy afterwards) and being in pain is so tiring!

This was the moment I stopped training full contact karate all those years ago. I was getting some form of minor injury as soon as the previous one was almost healed and decided I didn't want to live in pain on purpose. Why would I want to do this to myself? Back then the only pro I ended up finding was "because it's cool/tough to be good at this as a girl!"

I'm not giving up yet.. but man I'm feeling very down about this all. I really hope that this is just a beginners period of shit. The other beginners don't seem to get injured as much though. So what is this? I'm not generally a cluts.. or am I.. *looks at the previous post about all the broken bones while growing up*

Meh.

PS Sorry about all the whining. But this is a blog about the journey of becoming a player in a full contact sport. Journeys go up and down. If not they are nothing to be proud of in the end. ;)

Mothers

When growing up and even a bit after that I attracted a lot of a injuries playing outdoors, amongst which a fractured pinky, heelbone, wrist and elbow, but also lots of scrapings and sprains. The wrist and elbow needed operations to prevent the joint from becoming disfunctional (some of you have seen the under arm length difference). After a while of coming home crying and in pain a lot it almost came as far as me not daring to go home when I had injured myself because in the end my loving mother would just get angry in stead of expressing pity: "what did you do now!?"

The elbow was the most recent one at age 21 (by then I wasn't living at home anymore). I had fallen off a horse and while I was coming down head first-ish I somehow decided it would be a good thing to catch myself on a stretched out arm. Needless to say that was not one of my best ideas ever. When I came home from the hospital that same night I was seriously doubting if I should call my mother to inform her that her one and only duckling had once again hurt herself. In the end I did and the expected sighs came instantly. I remember saying something like: "but really mom, it feels like this has been the last serious injury in my life now. I'm done with getting injured."

Now try and imagine me explaining to her that I joined a Roller Derby team.

She wondered why on earth I would want to sabbotage my nice life by getting a broken leg and I of course answered with the non-argument of the possibility of getting hit by a bus when crossing the street the next day. I also admitted that it is indeed a risk. It's a full contact sport so injuries can be a part of it, but then I went on to say that it is because my life is working out so nicely since a few years that I would be able to take a broken leg without any major problems. And I truely believed that.

After going around with a sprained knee for less than a week I am not so sure of that statement anymore. I've only missed two Derby trainings and some inbetween activity of strength training and walks, I can still bike, I can even walk! Well, I walk very slowly and after about 100 meters it starts to hurt. But still, this is nothing compared to 6 weeks in a cast and I'm going nuts already!

Now I'm just nagging. Gonna see how my knee takes some low resistance biking at the gym today.

PS Haven't called my mother since I hurt my knee.

No skating.. just watching

So.. here I go on sunday and now tonight on monday again, to the skatehall. Not to skate, no, to watch *grumble*. We got a few more new girls and two of them have size boat, just like me, so I figured as long as I can't roll in my lovely skates myself, I might as well give the new girls a chance to roll in them. We don't really have that much stuff to loan out yet.

To not get bored I took my camera with me on sunday. Next time I should bring my tripod as well, because this was damn hard in the bad lighting.

The sisters doing some light tackling.

Yay! Thorey's first time on skates since childhood. The skates are mine.

Whip it!

Not just fun and games. Strength training is important to take and give the hits as well as to take a fall.

Still no footage of me on skates! I have some from my very first training, but that is top secret material with a need-to-know label and you do NOT need to know. Once the first learning curve starts to flatten out a bit I'll try and get some new pics or maybe even a vid.

Derby kisses,
Dutchess

Slaughters Daughters fundraiser

Woohoo! Our flyer is finished! Check it out:

Click here to go to the Facebook event

For the moment the tickets are only up for presale at Hardwear in town, but I'm still waiting for info on wether or not I will get some tickets to sell as well. Either way there is only a limited number of tickets available. Let me know if you are planning to join us and if you got your ticket yet!

Derby kisses,
Dutchess

Dutchess gets terminated

So... twice to the doctor in 48 hours. Both times because of Roller Derby. The first time to make sure that all the hits on my spine and pelvis hadn't caused a more serious injury and then today because of last night's training:

We got to do a couple of jams again. Yay! In the first jam I got to try out the position of Terminator again, this time against a more experienced rollergirl and dang! it's a fun position. I didn't expect to be able to catch miss Monkey at all, since she's good at jumping from side to side to fool you and then sprint past you on the other side. She's very agile on skates where as I am mainly trying to hold my balance while doing checks and trying to find tricks to stay balanced when an expected impact doesn't happen (see earlier post). But I managed to tackle her once and block her a few times. It felt awesome!

Then the second jam we had to change roles and BadAss Babuska thought that I should try out the position of jammer. Now, if you've read the other post on practice jams and watched the vids I posted, you can figure out that the jammer is the one that gets the highest speed and is also the one that everyone of the opposing team is trying to block/tackle. Miss Monkey, who I previously drove out of bounds and who then ended up on the floor, was now going to be a blocker concentrating on me... And then the opposing jammer was Scary Mary, a girl with nice speed and good overview on who is where and how to react to that. I felt so out of place!

But there the pack takes off, I get on my toestops and on the second "GO!" I try out the toestop running that we just tried for the first time a week ago. I am sure Scary Mary took it easy, cause I made it first into the first turn. I can't for the life of me remember what everybody else in the pack was doing, but Miss Monkey looks back, stares me straight in the eye and tenses up, ready to skate into me. I brace myself and lo and behold, I can take the hit and make it past her. I can't really remember any of the other stuff happening, but the result was that Scary Mary made it through the pack first. I didn't care, I made it past Miss Monkey! On the second lap the same situation more or less gets set up, but this time the outer bounds of the track are made up by a wall and I get plowed into it by Miss Monkey. The next .5 sec is what made me go to the doctor today, I get scared, come out of derby position (ie stand up straight) and land in a front to back split, sandwhiched between the lovely Miss Monkey and the stupid wall. The foot I had backwards, was 'nicely' rotated out so that my knee only just didn't snap like a boiled chicken leg.

The doctor told me that I should take it easy on my knee for a while but that there is no serious damage done. So no torn ligaments or fractured bones. The ligaments have just been stretched in an extreme way. When I asked her if I could be part of this sunday's training, she laughed. I hope to be back on skates soon!