The beatings shall continue until morale improves!

So with the added skating (LCC & zebra with STDD on weekdays) comes added bruises, aches and pains. On Monday a 70-year old that skates for LCC, Merby Dick, and I got tangled in a pack midway through collapsing like a dying star and my arm ended up on the receiving end of one of his skates, as did my helmet. Don't worry, the helmet was ok... as was Merby, that dude is a tank.

Injury is probably the most feared aspect of the sport. PMRD has seen 3 skaters sidelined with injuries from practice alone. How do you play and avoid injury? As I understand it there are two major factors: training and luck. Unfortunately, you can only influence one of them, and I don't mean in the breaking mirrors kind of way. Everyone has to pass minimum skills to bout, and should be doing so to scrimmage as well. Some skaters I have spoken with about this has said that often minimum skills alone are not enough to make someone a safe skater. Sure, you can fall small when you're told to and are actively focusing on doing it, but what about when that refrigerator on wheels comes out of no-where and drops the hammer on you?

It takes a good bit of training to properly fall small when you are going down on someone else's terms. In my case I was promised a thorough beating topped off with no small amount of sprawl drills before I really learned my lesson and started turning into human origami when I felt the horizon start to shift. Even still I have my moments. Also, I had to change my view of taking a knee. I went from looking at is as admitting defeat or losing control to thinking of it as hitting a reset button. It should take less than a second to return to skating from a proper knee fall while that full on sprawl that you get for losing the fight with gravity will cost you a good 3+ seconds in many cases. That little difference in recovery time is all that their jammer needs to squirt by, or an opposing blocker to put the bad-touch all over your own fun-sized teammate sporting the star.

Hopefully your team/league is at a point where all your fellow skaters are as disciplined as you are, but thats not always the case. Other skaters are, oddly enough, your main source of face-plant fodder. Even when they're on your side a bad misstep can quickly result in the track punching you in the stomach. Worse still, when a teammate/opponent falls poorly they can trip others which quickly spreads like ripples in a pond until the whole pack is gut-surfing through turn 2. Skating with unsafe skaters who are participating beyond their skill level is often dangerous and you certainly should feel free to speak up to your coaches/teammates if you have concerns. Even the most seasoned skater still does minimal fall drills on occasion to keep skills sharp and check their form, so odds are you can benefit from them just as much as I can.

So get out there, lock those wheels, get the snot knocked out of you, and hit that floor... just practice doing so safely before hand.