Welcome to the Big League

I knew that passing minimum skills was just the start of a lot of hard work and training. But knowing that in my mind and knowing in my legs, ass, and the rest of my body were two different things.

Last night's practice was tough. It was my first time on the sport court (a plastic flooring surface that can be put down and removed). The sport court is slicker than the concrete we usually skate on (though not as much so as I was afraid). It is definitely going to take some getting used to.

The harder thing, though, was keeping up. I trained and worked *hard* to be able to skate 12-second laps (and to sustain that pace for at least five minutes at a time). But the trainers *warned* us that the pace the travel team goes for is more like 9 or 10 seconds. Still, hearing that and trying to skate it? Two different things.

But hey, a month ago I couldn't skate a 12-second lap, or at least I couldn't skate 25 of them in a row. I'll get there! That's what all this cardio I'm doing outside of practice is for.

And no one is pulling the hits anymore. The travel team girls have started hitting us at 100%. I took a lot of hard hits last night. The first one to knock me down was Boxxx, with a shoulder hit. Maybe I wasn't low enough, because I wouldn't have thought a shoulder hit should take me down like that. Hurt like hell, absolutely ... but knock me down? I don't know. Boxxx is a powerful hitter, for sure. But I probably also was not low enough.

I don't want to imply that Boxxx was the only one to knock me down last night -- far from it. :-)

We did a lot of scrimmage-y drills, which is awesome: we worked on breaking up walls, pushing our blocker partner into the jammer, and other stuff like that. Boxxx did something really awesome on one repetition of one of the drills when she was paired up with me and Emily (Belle Tolls ... gotta remember to call her by her derby name now that she has one). Belle and I both just passed min skills. We were blocking, and Boxxx was the jammer getting past us. Rather than just zip past us, which we all know Boxxx could totally have done, she worked at our level and helped us learn how to do the exercise. Thank you Boxxx!!!! (It's not that the other girls weren't doing that too ... but Boxxx was especially awesome.)

I spent a lot of last night feeling like a total idiot. A *slow* idiot. I have so much to learn. I'll get there, right?