Derby Diary #2 Challenges Thus Far

This is an occasional series chronicling my start in roller derby, presenting both perks and challenges of the sport. Today focuses on some of the initial challenges I've face when training to be a full-contact athlete on roller skates.

In case you missed it, here's my first entry.

Photo credit: Derby Baby

Starting anything fresh almost always has its challenges.

Most 16-year-old drivers aren't parallel parking experts. Professional athletes rarely become professionals on natural talent alone. Accomplishing most things, whether its career or personal goals, takes practice, patience, motivation, among other things. Sometimes it's even a matter of rethinking goals.

Back to relating these various challenges to roller derby: The learning curve in this sport is steep.

It starts with learning to skate. It sounds simple enough, but it's not just being able to skate in a circle at a rink. There's learning various stops (T-stop, plow stops, turn-around toe stops), how to accelerate (via crossovers), how to turn around while skating (transitions), backwards skating, and jumping over objects. There's also training for laps, essentially the sprints of derby. We're expected to complete 27 laps in five minutes by August in order to to be drafted onto a home team.

The first six weeks of our training was dedicated to skating alone. Adjusting to being on skates, learning derby stance (essentially a never-ending squat), was challenging enough. My knees ached in ways I have never experienced before. (Solution to knee aches? Fish Oil supplements, cardio cross training, and tons of stretching pre- and post-workout.)

Last month, I passed non-contact testing alongside 17 others in my fresh meat class, which was a great accomplishment. The keyword here is that I passed. I'm certainly no expert on wheels yet. There are still occasions when I fall over simply from losing my balance while standing.

On top of everything else: None of us are in high school anymore, when athletics and the trial and error lessons are fairly common. Many of us are learning a new sport in our 20s, 30s, even 40s.

Despite those challenges though, the group I've been working with has been so encouraging. Many of the ladies are from rec leagues, so they've mastered a lot of the basics. Others are like me, learning everything for the first time.

Transitions and turnaround toe stops at times are still very difficult for me. It mostly depends on my state of mind. And I know my crossover form (crossing one skate over the other to accelerate) could be much better. But I'm light years ahead from where I was in January, when I tied on skates for the first time in probably more than a decade.

I'm learning just how cerebral this sport can be. It's being able to training your mind to say you can when it seems impossible.

We're now learning various contact skills, another layer to add to our new found skating foundations, which includes a lot of hip checks and shoulder checks. It's all derby fundamentals we'll use in future bouts.

One thing I do seem to have a natural knack for is taking a hit, much to my surprise. Learning the contact aspect has been one of my biggest fears, but as it turns out, I'm much better at blocking than I thought I would be for just starting out.

Learning to hit others is the challenge I'm finding in contact. Knocking others over, or hitting others hard enough to get bruises and welts, is frowned upon most other life situations. On our fresh meat forum, some of the ladies are sharing pictures of their bruises like badges of pride. This kind of cultural sadomasochism is something I'm still not quite used to yet.

The other big challenge so far, albeit a bit less essential, is getting my lap requirements. While I've improved, I'm falling short of the 27 laps I eventually have to make. It's been frustrating. And I know part of that frustration comes from seeing others who can accomplish it so easily.

But like in anything else, comparisons are fruitless. We all learn at our own pace. That's perhaps the biggest challenge of all for me to learn.

Another meatie also has a blog with a feature about her roller derby experiences. Read her blog here.

Derby Diary #1

I'm introducing an occasional series chronicling my start in roller derby, presenting both perks and challenges of the sport. For the first entry, I'm mostly going to focus on why I decided to subject myself to a full-contact sport on roller skates. Enjoy and have a great weekend!

Photo credit: Derby Baby

I can’t pinpoint when I first heard about roller derby, but I don’t think it was the movie Whip It. In all honesty, I think I read a story about an NPR reporter who did roller derby when I was finishing college.

It may have been this story?

I guess it doesn’t matter which story I read. But from there, I did some Google research and discovered Pittsburgh’s team, Steel City. That’s when the idea was planted in my psyche, which was about five years ago.

(A quick history lesson: For those who don’t know, roller derby initially became popular in the 1930s, became a popular TV sport among men in the 1970s, and there was a resurgence of women’s teams in the early 2000s in Texas.)

What I do remember vividly is when I first expressed an interest in doing it aloud. I was a 23-year-old intern at a magazine staff party. We were sitting on the back porch of the intern house on a fall, twilight evening, and all of the interns were asked about their goals post-internship. I said my dream was to someday work for NPR and play roller derby.

I mean, if you don’t dream big, why bother, right?

I think there were other things that drew me to the sport: The mystique, the fringe, badass vibe. The fact that skaters are known by alter ego names and identities, and come from various backgrounds, ages, stages of life.

Even the ladies on fresh meat (aka roller derby noobs) with me vary widely in age and profession; one graduated from high school last year, while another is in her 40s and an accomplished speed skater from back in the day.

I think after I quit rowing, which I had done for six years throughout high school and during college, I also craved a sense of camaraderie — a sense of team.

But perhaps I enjoyed the concept more than anything at that point. There were a few pegs against me from the start.

I was a terrible skater as a child, often the kid at birthday parties digging my nails into the carpeted walls on the edges of the track, overwhelmed with fear I would fall. I also got burned by a contact sport activity in high school. I did powderpuff one year, which was supposed to be flag football for girls, but a girl tackled me from the side unexpectedly. It was a highly illegal move. I still have intermittent back pain to this day because of that experience. Thankfully, working out my back regularly and keeping it strong subsides the pain most of the time.

Despite those drawbacks, however, my interest persisted.

A few years had gone by before taking the steps to tryout for a team. I moved around a bit with various jobs. When I was in rural Ohio, the closest derby league was an hour and a half away. When I moved back to the Pittsburgh area and looked up information on tryouts at Steel City, I missed the date by a week. I was crushed. I had to wait another year.

However, a friend had recently joined a nearby league. Barb took me under her wing a bit. She answered some of my questions, we attended a few bouts together, and I loved it. I knew this was something I wanted to do.

Those first boot camp days a few months ago were incredibly difficult. Despite my consistent interest, I still hadn’t bothered putting on skates until those introductory days, and it showed. I was too intimidated to try. One of the other skaters duct taped all the pads onto me, since I drove through a snowstorm to get there and was late. All of the pads were too big.

There are a lot of challenges and hurdles I’ve tackled so far, and some I’m still working on, but I’ll go into that more later.

The 15 plus other women I’m learning to skate with are very supportive of one another, and for me it’s great to have that feeling of closeness within a group for the first time in a very long while.

Best of all though, I’m just glad I’m finally getting halfway to my early 20-something doe-eyed pipe dream: playing roller derby.

(S)Kate

This post is to celebrate being a new roller derby recruit. Huzzah! It's been a goal of mine for awhile to try it out, so it's excited that it's happening at last. :)

I'm pictured above, about four years old, tightly holding onto my cousin Casey's hand, at the same skating rink where I'll be training this winter and spring. (I would kill for those Barbie themed elbow and knee pads! Haha.) A product of the 80s, roller rink trips were occasional but consistent. I often was the person with a death grip on the carpeted wall all the way around the rink. Apparently my mom and I went on a few skating lessons when I was about five, but then she learned she was pregnant with my sister so we stopped going.

Even though I've only been skating for a few weeks now, I can say I'm much more confident on skates. I can stop without running into a wall and everything! We'll see how things go moving forward. Wish me luck!