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.

2 Months Later...

So the alien abduction was a hoax, so I'm back with an update to briefly summarize the past 2 months:

I moved to Corvallis for grad school, skating semi-regularly with the Lane County Concussion team until my car decided to cook the motor. My landord plays on the Sick Town Derby Dames team, so I am eventually going to be refereeing in some capacity here. Once the motor is rebuilt then I'm going to be on a regular 4x/week derby schedule plus whatever outdoor skating I work in around class.

The last couple months have brought a few more new skaters at PMRD with our new guys moving along nicely. Unfortunately, our captain and league president (Carpe Demon) suffered a bad fibia spiral fracture at the end of our first coed scrimmage and will be recovering from the injury until February or so.

I got to play in RCR's coed scrimmage last weekend where I witnessed the shock and awe that was Quadzilla. Seriously, I think he is 3 people sharing the same space and time, he was that good. Great eye-opener to how far I have left to go, but I would be pretty content to achieve maybe 1/3-1/2 his skill.

Hopefully I'll be somewhat more timely in my updates, and the weekly remind from the new phone should help with that as well...

And now we sweat

Practice this morning, earlier than usual to accommodate the double header for the final day of the Hometown Throwdown (Awesome derby weekend with 6 bouts of nationally ranked teams, so we got started at 9am instead of our usual 11am. That 2 hour earlier start time meant I got less sleep the night before, but also meant a 15+ degree cooler hangar to practice in, good trade!

Speed Dealer, Earl Slick, and Macho-Mexican/Han Cholo were up from Lane county concussion and started us out with some endurance work. First up was paceline work, lapping the pack before weaving through. Next we did the elevator doors paceline which has been shamelessly stolen from the B.A.D. girls warm-ups. In this drill, the paceline constantly spreads from the center of the track to the inner/outer boundaries and then back to the center at the whistle while the people in the back shoot ahead 1-3 spots every whistle until they reach the front. It helps teach quick steps, lateral movement, awareness, communication, and some unfortunate fitness as well. Apparently roller derby involves exercise. Unfortunately, it also involved an injury. Killa'volt locked wheels during a split and went down hard on a knee he had been nursing for the last month, resulting in swelling and bruising that undid a lot of patience & time spent healing.

Since LCC can out-pace the majority of our team, they led us through pyramid sprints as an endurance/speed building exercise. A skater starts with 1 lap sprinting, then a lap coasting, then 2 of each and so on up to 5 laps and then working back down to one lap. As much fun as that sounds, again it turned out to be more exercise. I did appreciate the work though and can see places I can improve my speed and form for a more efficient stride and better lap time. In particular, I liked how this drill really helped me get a head start on my sweating for the day, something I was worried might not get going properly today, with a high of only 96 deg...

After the screaming stopped Anarchy counted us off into two teams and were we given the privilege of wearing red and black pennies that were previously used to wrap cadavers that sat in the sun. Seriously, someone needs to wash or burn those things, they are a bigger health risk than smoking or Keith Richards. I was on the red team consisting of myself, Han Cholo, Speed Dealer, Next of Ken, Silent Mob, and El Guapo. Demon, Bubba, Earl Slick, Beeswhacks, Kill Nye, Boof, and later Cupples SK8 made up the black team. Scrimmage was more heavily slanted towards what I am used to compared to the scrimmage last Monday; strong defensive walls, communication, and teamwork. Bubba took a bad fall that hyper-extended an elbow (scary) for our second injury of the day. Jams were moving at a faster pace than previous scrimmages with fewer/shorter breaks in between. I jammed a few times with moderate success, except for one jam where Bubba was invisible only to me and somehow got by without me seeing him, causing no small amount of embarrassment.

Goal for the week: Survive California, cause I'm going camping. Gonna try not to get back-blocked by a pinecone!