Eat, Sleep, Skate

So far, I'm doing really well with my goal to skate almost every day during Sick Town's break. Friday, I skated on a bike path that runs from 35th to 53rd Streets through some OSU farmland (it's the one with the covered bridge). It's a nice, wide asphalt path. There's a fair amount of debris, but it's pretty good for skating. I did two "laps" (35th to 53rd and back), which works out to about eight miles. Not too bad. There's a pretty good hill at the 53rd Street end -- steep enough to hurt going up, and to be fun coming down, but not steep enough to be at all scary.

Saturday, Charlie and I were NSOs (non-skating officials) for a junior derby tournament in Eugene. Some of those girls (whose ages I would guess range from 12 to 18) are *amazing* skaters. I didn't know what to expect going into it; I had never seen junior derby before. It's the same as adult derby, except that the girls are younger. They use the same rules as we do (WFTDA rules) and it's just as much a full-contact sport.

Since it was a double-elimination tournament, every team got to skate at least two 30-minute bouts. Charlie and I were supposed to work all 10 bouts, but Stat Brat (ECRG's awesome NSO and, I assume, statistician) took over for me for one so I could have a break. If she hadn't spelled me for a bout, I would have been on my feet pretty much non-stop from 11 until 6:30. That's what Charlie did. It was exhausting. Fun, but exhausting. The refs and other NSOs we worked with were awesome. And there were Voodoo Doughnuts in the refs' room. I had two and then made myself switch to granola bars and trail mix when I wanted a snack. :-)

Today, Charlie and I went and skated on the Periwinkle bike path here in Albany. It's not a great skating path -- it's concrete, and in some spots it's in pretty poor condition. It's also not a very long path, and there's one point where you have to cross the street and if you're coming from the west, you can't see the road (thanks to the vegetation) and it's a fairly sharp little hill leading down to the street. Yikes!

So, I don't know if I will skate there again. It's probably worth the drive to Corvallis to skate at Willamette Park or the OSU path instead.

I'm certainly not getting as much of a workout as I get at derby practice, but at least when I go to Rollercon (in just over a week, holy shitballs!), I won't have been off my skates for two weeks.