Second Practice

Second practice this week, only 5 of us skating, but also attended the board meeting to be better informed/involved. Learned a lot about our relationship with RCR and got to voice my opinion (despite it's newness in the group) on open questions of interest and goals.

Today Demon asked if we had any special requests for the day and I wanted to do some basic hit drills. Though before we did that I asked about practicing falls and doing squats since they're generally related. So after squats and falls (which I am happy to say I have gotten MUCH better about getting up into motion using my toe-stop from a knee after a single knee fall) we paired up and did basic contact drills. Since many of us had never put a hit on anyone we started with just making legal contact. Not bad, but doing so with any coordination is harder than it looks for sure. A person on the outside was designated the hitter and their partner, conveniently gliding along in the 'derby' position, the one taking the hit. Once we all had a few runs through barely bumping into each other Demon changed it up so the hitter would continuously push their opposite until they were forced out of bounds to the inside, changing up to do it again in opposite roles on the next straight away.

Taking the hit, no problem, sit there and be a trauma sponge until you're forced across the line. Dealing the hit was a real challenge for me. First, I don't feel terribly confident on my skates in close proximity to others just yet so I was quite cautions about accidentally clipping someone's wheel during the line-up and approach. Second, these were my teammates and that always makes me a bit nervous when potentially causing injury. Long story short, I liked the contact drills, but thought my hits/contact was crap. Perhaps this week along the Springwater trail I'll farm a jogger or two for practice... probably not.

Overall, feeling better about the skating, but really need the weather to clear up so I can add outdoor skating to the weekly routine and start building some endurance to prep for the 2-hour practices we hope to move to. I have a nice section of the trail picked out that is a 6-mile round trip from the apartment which should start to really help build up those oddball skating muscles and give me more general skate time.