This is seriously one of my favorite drills because it looks really pretty when it is done well! It's also mega-effective for keeping jammers behind you, and/or for giving a jammer multiple hits. I've got the three-blocker version here, but you can do it with two or four blockers as well (or do this and have a roving blocker).
Basically, set up as normal and have your blockers take off the pivot line:
As they go into the first turn, they should be heading in towards the inside line. Since the apex is the shortest way around the track, holding the inside line on the turn really prevents jammers from being able to get past. A jammer who takes the outside will have way more work to do to get past the blockers, and it's much easier for a blocker who is holding the inside to quickly go out and hold them up as well.
How you have your blockers on the inside line on the turn seems to vary. I've seen blockers in a staggered pack, (so you have people at 45 degrees in front and behind you) or in a line so everyone is holding the inside, or whatever.
When you get to the straightaway, fan out so that the blockers are more or less in a line (or you can stagger this again to cover more space, but my MS paint skillz are kinda crap). The first blocker should go furthest to the outside. This will cover pretty much all the area on the straight (unless you are me and have really short arms, which makes it easy for a sneaky jammer to get past because I can't be touching my teammates as easily):
On the next turn, the outmost blocker (#1 in the picture) falls back in behind the other blockers, such that they clump together at the next apex:
Again, this way your blockers are taking the shortest route around the corner. Unless you are up against a stupidly fast jammer, you shouldn't have a problem with the jammer trying to get past you. Even if blocker #1 is able to positional block the jammer by herself, it's still strategically better for her to drop into the inside line and hold that, because it's faster. Also, if the jammer speeds up to try and get past the blockers on the outside, the blockers can pretty easily speed up to stay ahead of her:
When you come out of the turn, the last blocker (#1 in the picture) takes over holding the inside line from Blocker #2, and then everyone fans out again for the straightaway:
At the next turn, B3 will drop behind the others and become the inside line blocker and B2 becomes the outside blocker on the next straightaway, and so on.
The rule for this one is to HOLD THE INSIDE LINE.
The second rule for this is to KNOW WHERE YOUR TEAMMATES ARE. Touch them, push them into position (usually good for the person who is coming around behind the back to replace whoever is on the inside line), talk to them.
This drill takes a bit of getting used to before you know what you're doing, so doing maybe 3-4 rotations makes sense. It's kind of like learning how to do a braid or something: at first you're all like ARGH but once you see the pattern with what your hands are doing it's really quite easy. Similar, once you have the drill going and your blockers are constantly waterfalling and are being really effective with their communication and positioning, it looks really good, like a well-oiled machine. And then it is hard to get jammers through (you can test it with a fourth person jamming behind them)!
So, there are at least four roller derby leagues in this area. Hooray. League tourism is the best kind of tourism. Last night I drove up to train with Sonoma County Roller Derby. I contacted them a few weeks back and did the "Hey can I skate with you?" thing and they were really awesome about it and were all like "Sure! Come along, and check us out and here are all our training times" which sounded really friendly and awesome.
SCRD have been around since 2007 and got their WFTDA affiliation last year. They are a smaller league than BAD, but they have a travel team (the Wine Country Homewreckers... how is that for a name?!!) and also junior derby! Like, for reals. Little kids on skates. I don't know if they hit each other as much though. I don't know much about junior derby generally for that matter.
Anyway, SCRD have an open skate/newbie night on Tuesday, so I thought I would check it out first to gauge what their training levels are like. Plus, I wanted to get some skate on during the week and just work on some of my basic skills. So yeah, their ground is called The Wrecking Yard, and it's a relatively new venue. It's also on a main street in downtown Santa Rosa, so how's that for having a skating venue right in your face? Also, they have an AMAZING floor, which looks tiled but it so smooth and flat and fantastic to skate on. It's not sealed yet though so you're not allowed to bring drinks onto the trainng track. But yeah. Even walking across it to get to the locker room was awesome. I was excited to skate on it.
I went to their locker room and introduced myself to some of their skaters. Their social skate is open to everyone but mostly it's league people getting more training in, as well as a couple of newbies and junior skaters. One of them had the derby name "San Franpsycho" which I thought was mega cute. After I filled in their paperwork I handed it in and went to pay and
found out something really awesome: Training is normally $5 but it's
free to skaters who are visiting from another league! Hooray! How's that
for being welcoming and awesome!
They have lockers in their locker room! I wish we had lockers.
Or a locker room, for that matter.
That night they also had a TV show crew or something recording a doco on their league, and apparently now I might be on some doco about roller
derby. It apparently is showing in Australia and New Zealand later this
year. Hahaha. But the host of the show (Bree) and the producer (Bob) were also putting skates on to have a roll around. Anyway, I might be famous. Ha ha.
Anyway, to training. I was mega excited to be skating on that super nice surface there, so I did a couple of laps before everyone else was on track just to get a feel for it. It was a really smooth surface and not stupidly slippery, but it was hard if you fell on it because there wasn't much give. But it wasn't terrible, and I felt good skating on it after a couple of pre-warmup warmup laps. And then it was warmup time, and the warmup was TWENTY-FIVE IN FIVE. Hahahaha. The last time I did that was... geez, I think it was before we even used the star system, like way back in July or something when we were still training on one court at ANU and I got like 22 or 23. But yeah, it was good. And I nailed it. :D
Oh, but then warmup wasn't over yet. Everyone sat down and did stretches (and introductions, and also went through league matters, which I found really interesting) and then there was more warmup. It was another 25 in 5. But this time it was ANTI-DERBY. Holy shit. I think I managed all 25 but just barely a split second before the whistle went to stop. Also, I need to get better at crossing on my anti-derby side.
OMG. SUCH A NICE FLOOR.
Then it was time for drills. The coach tonight was Pain, who's on their travel team. We did a booty blocking drill in groups of three. Basically, you started lying on your front on the jammer line (and so did 2 other people), and then when the whistle went you had to get to the front of the pack. When you were at the front, you had to booty block to stop the other people getting ahead of you. If you got ahead, then you booty blocked the other people. It was a good drill, and I was pretty quick getting up off the ground and to the front, but 1) I need to work on doing a really tight block (like when the other girls did it, it was like a derby sandwich) and 2) I almost elbowed someone when I did sprint elbows. Whoops. But it was a great learning experience. You basically did this for two laps, and then another three people would have a go. Those that weren't cleared for hitting just did the lying down bit and then they raced for two laps.
Then we did some lateral stepping drills. Basically, you walked sideways down to the end of the track and back. I still find this kind of hard, I don't know why. I can do it for a bit, but then I roll. Or because I have stupidly short legs I have to take twice as many steps as everyone so I look mega slow doing it. Hahaha. Lame sauce. But it was good, and then we did lateral stepping across the track. Like, you started on the inside line and then lateral stepped to the outside line, then you had to touch the outside line with your hand (so you had to stay low) and then move back to the inside line. Then, after doing that a few times, half the people kept doing it while the other half skated and did laps, using the people who were lateral moving as obstacles they needed to avoid. If you went over the track lines, you did pushups.
Actually, they're generally quite strict with stuff like listening when Pain is talking. Basically if you talk when she's talking, you do pushups. It worked, although the junior derby kids did quite a few pushups because they kept wanting to talk to the TV people...
What your feet are doing when you duck walk
Then, we did the duck walk. Basically you put your feet out sideways and walk so the insteps of your feet are pointing forwards and your wheels are perpendicular to where you are walking to. It helps if you bend your knees for that (although you do end up kinda bow legged ) but this helps with running starts when you aren't up on toe stops, and also for transitioning. So we did those a bit. Again, short legs = too many steps = mega slow at this. Haha.
And then after that we practiced stops. We only did Ts and Plows this time, but basically we put cones all down the room, and you just stopped at each cone. However, once you had come to a complete stop, you had to pick up speed before heading to the next cone, and you did this by running on your toe stops on the spot for a bit before skating up to the next cone and then stopping. Running on your toe stops is a big thing here. I think I did okay on that, but need to work on more toe stop work.
We also did 1 and 2-knee falls. But to make sure that we were falling properly and not doing "smashy-smashy" on our knees (as Pain called it), we practiced knee taps first. Basically, this is like doing lunges on skates. Not bad as a workout component, and it made sure you were careful with how you put your knees down. We did regular 1-knee falls, then 1-knee 180s (interestingly, people seemed to turn the same way regardless of which knee they were falling on??) and then 2-knees. I fucking love two knee slides. Sadly, my felted pads smeared lines of black and yellow melted felt and duct tape all over their nice floor, ha ha. But they didn't seem to mind too much.
Blue leopard print bleachers? MEGA CUTE.
Finally, we paired up and did pyramid laps. You skate one lap, then your partner does one. Then you skate two, and then your partner does two. And so on, going up to four laps per person and then coming back down. I liked this drill a lot. Your partner helps you count your laps, and then you count theirs and/or yell encouragement/abuse as they skate.
And then we were done! There wasn't any warmdown or anything, and people seemed to just want to take their skates off and go home or whatever. If you have jelly legs, they have these adorable bleachers with blue leopard print fabric and SCRD cushions (made out of old SCRD merch!) that you can lounge around on. I did a few warmdown laps because I liked their floor so much, and while I was doing that Pain and some of the other ladies were being interviewed for this roller derby documentary thing. Oh, and SCRD also has a newbies wall where they take your picture up next to their banner and then they print it out and it goes on their wall. Lady Sparks took my picture for the wall so it'll be there next week when I go again to training, whoo.
I've heard them be called "bushings", and then some people say "cushions". (For the purposes of this picture, I looked up "powerdyne bushings" and the image name says "cushions" so go figure.)
Anyway, whatever they are called, I got these things. (Er, I'll call them bushings for the purpose of this post.) Bushings are kind of like skate suspension, so if you get good ones they really help you with distributing energy and then dispersing it when you need it, like pushing or jumps or whatever. They come in different hardnesses, depending on your weight (so heavier people need harder ones) and also how much control you want, relative to the squishiness of your skates.
When I went to Cruz Skate Shop, I picked up these babies to replace my stock bushings. These are the Powerdyne Magic Hop-Up Kit Skate Bushings. They have four bushings per skate: two regular round ones, and two conical ones, as well as the bushing cups (the metal things). They're a little bit (like, $5) pricier than regular, non-conical ones that don't have bushing cups. But (as Steffin Razor said) they're heaps better because you get more control over your turns and the cups also help with that thing. She also put my bushings in for me, yay.
Protip: Pointy conical end points away from your plate
The ones I got were the medium ones (orange), being factored by my weight and also the wheels I have already (which are quite soft at 88A). The squishiest ones are the reds (78A), the orange ones are around 82A and then there are hard ones (yellows) at 85A. There are also extra hard (purple I think?) ones at 90, and then some other ones (green, black) but I don't know what those ones are. Also, different brands have different hardnesses at different colours, and there are different bushings for different plates, which is kind of annoying. But oh well. I guess that means you just need to do more research.
I had a roll on them tonight at training and there's a subtle but obvious difference on them. Cornering is easier and my wheels feel more responsive. One thing about squishier bushings is that after you skate on them a bit they compress, so you need to tighten your trucks to compensate for that. I think the compression stops after a while, but you get it at first when your bushings first get used. But overall, I felt like I had more control in my laps. Doing jumps in them is also fun because it's not as hard on my ankles.
Overall, they're pretty good. I think that switching out bushings can be a cheaper and probably just as effective a way of gaining more control on the track than buying new wheels, so this might be a way to go if you're finding that you're sliding out a bit on your turns and whatnot but don't want to drop like hundreds of bucks on wheels.
In San Francisco there's a really big park called Golden Gate Park. It's bigger than Central Park in NYC, stretching from the middle of the city to the beach. It's big enough to have a museum--well, the California Academy of Science anyway--and a Polo Field and even a (yes, get this) bison enclosure in it. It also has lots of biking and running trails, so it sounds like it has outdoor skate potential.
That's a whole lotta park.
I haven't skated it yet, but I was walking through it the other day and came across a map of the park with one of those "you are here" thingies and pointing to different park attractions like the rose garden and the duck pond and the Skate Area.
What? So, apparently there's a thing on the map that says "Skate Area". There's apparently a big inline skating culture in this area. There are a
couple of bike-and-skate rental shops around the park that rent out
quads and fruit boots by the hour or day, so yeah. Of course, I had to go check it out.
Haha, it even specifies Roller Skating Area. :D
Actually, I heard the place before I even saw it. There was really old time 70s and 80s roller disco music playing from what turned out to be a wheelie suitcase boombox. The Roller Skating Area turned out to be just that. It was a flat,
painted concrete area (but it'd be sooo nice to skate on) near JFK Drive
and 6th Ave., on the edge of the park. and when I got there it was pretty much empty except for an old black guy who was dancing on rollerblades and a middle-aged lady who had handpainted old-timey skate boots who was skating in circles and twirling ribbons. (I couldn't get a photo of her or her boots or her ribbons because she kept flailing around too fast for my camera phone to handle.)
Surface, plus rollerblade-dancing old dude.
There's a derby-sized track line (at least for inside track I think) painted on the ground, so I might have to have a proper skate in the city one day.
I also found out that Sunday is the day to show up on skates in the park, at least for random wheeled shennanigans. From what I understand you just BYO skates (or whatever you have) and just go nuts in the park. SF Citizen had this to say about it:
Kennedy Drive in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park is closed to auto traffic. The roadway is transformed into
a 21st century recreational paradise where skaters, bikes, runners and
other park users use the asphalt to have a great time. There is a
special area at 6th Avenue and Kennedy Drive called, “Skatin’ Place”.
Here skaters boogie to the music all day long. They
glide with style and grace. Some work on skate dance routines. Others
hone their skills on the slalom course. Many sit on the hillside and
watch in awe. It is the greatest example of a public outdoor roller rink
in the middle of Golden Gate Park. (from this link)
(Picture: San Francisco Citizen)
Oh, yes. And some will work on their derby skills, while trying to steal the furry red leg warmers off that dude in the picture.
The sign says "Why walk when you can roll?"
GOOD QUESTION.
This weekend was particularly rainy, and derby training was cancelled because the shed we trained in flooded and everything got wet. The track is pretty slippery already, so trying to skate on wet plastic tiles? No thanks. I was supposed to get a ride to training with some of the BAD ladies, and we were meeting at a local skate shop as our pickup place. Oh well. No harm going to the skate shop anyway, yes? :)
Cruz Skate Shop is in the Mission district in San Francisco. There's a really good BBQ place on the corner too with great pulled pork and mac and cheese, but that's another story. Anyway, I really like brick and mortar skate shops. This one did mostly skateboard stuff, but they had a nice selection of derby skates as well. I didn't get a photo of them this time around because I ended up buying other things and not really perving on skates, but I did get to grope some $700 Antiks. They felt very nice, for the record. Also, most skatey things are cheaper here than they are in Australia, so I might try to stock up on things. Ze Boyfriend, for example, got some safety gear and his wristguards here (Pro-Tecs) were like $14.99 plus tax, while in Australia they're selling on Derbyskates.com.au for something like $27. I wanted to try some of the new Hired Hands that 888 was apparently making in ridiculously small sizes, but they didn't have any. Also, I was REALLY tempted to buy yet more wheels, but I didn't really need them (for now).
I was served by Steffin Razor, who was skating with BAD but transferred from Sillicon Valley Roller Girls. I told her I just started skating there too and she was saying how BAD was mega serious on fitness (so all that crazy stuff I talked about in my last entry is normal fitness training for them!) and how they really step it up and they're much tougher than other leagues. She's been skating for about four years, so I'm sure she knows what she's talking about. We also talked about roller derby in Australia and how the paint came off Atom wheels really quickly (because she saw my Super-Gs and was like "what are those, Atom Whites?") and Blood and Thunder and other fun things. Yeah, she was cool. :)
Steffin at work in the store with my skates. The guy with the mo also
recommended the lunch special at the BBQ place around the corner
from the shop.
I did want to buy some new bushings though because I had been skating on my stock ones which were ridiculously hard. Steffin gave me a bunch of advice on different kinds of bushings (there's round ones and conical ones and then different coloured ones depending on your weight and what position you play and then also what plates you're on) and in the end I got the orange Powerdyne Magic Hop-Up Kit ones. I'll do a product review later. I also had my skates with me, and she offered to actually change the bushings out for me as well, which was mega awesome! So I let her take my skates apart and she went through and gave me a basic lesson in skate anatomy while she replaced the bushings. It was cool having someone who actually knew what they were doing actually putting the bushings on; they're conical so I would have had a 50% chance of fucking it up I think. Steffin also pointed out that the pivot on the stock plates are straight pin ones, but on the higher end plates (like the Powerdyne revenge and reactor plates) they have ball and socket pins, so you get more control in your turns and whatnot. Maybe I'll have to upgrade to those...
Random old skates in the shop that you could roll around in!
(Also, note presence of FiveOnFive in the corner.)
I also wanted some new toe stops, and they have a whole bunch that are like gumballs but not really. They had gumballs too, and Steffin said that she skated on those and they were great. A lot of people I skate with are on those, so I'm sure they are. They also had these Snyder toe stops which were huge (like bigger than gumballs) and ones that had one pre-flattened end so you ran on a flat toe stop thingy, which was weird. I settled for some Powerdyne Moonwalkers because they were just as light as the gumballs and seemed a bit grippier (apparently on account that they have holes in them?) and also because they came in red. Yep. Product review to come on those too. But Steffin also put those ones in my skates for me, and she said that our tennis ball toe guards were a really good idea. Ha.
Oh, and then she told me "the secret" for toe stops. Ever wonder how much you need to screw your toe stops in? Well, apparently you make a triangle with your toe stop and your front wheels, and then your back wheels should be about three inches off the ground. She showed me on my skates with a tape measure and everything, but because my skates are tiny that basically means screwing the toe stop all the way in. But not actually all the way in; some times the screws are too long so if you do screw them all the way in and stomp on your toe stop you can break the top of the plate on your skate and the screw can go through the fabric into your boot. Apparently that happened to someone at SVRG when Steffin was there. Ouch. So, almost all the way in, but not all.
Anyway, I think I spent like 40 minutes at Cruz, as well as actually making purchases. It was fun, and I liked getting pro tips and talking shop. The only weird thing was that I was in there and then some random homeless person walked by and yelled something about how we were all skaters or something at us and then probably something about Jesus (I didn't understand what she said) and then kept walking. Oh well, it is the Mission, right? Since we meet there to get rides to training, I am sure I will be back. Oh yeah, and you get a discount if you tell them you skate with BAD/RR! Yay.
EDIT: Apparently I thought I spent 40 minutes at Cruz, but ze boyfriend informs me that it was more like two hours. Oh well.
Yes, I'm such an international woman of mystery, jetsetting about and whatnot. I'm in San Francisco at the moment for two months. Of course, everyone knows that the US is the home of derby and that derby is like 52372865203875 times way more hardcore here than anywhere else in the world. So yep, I'm training with the Bay Area Derby (yes, BAD) Girls. Or trying to, but I'll explain later. Anyway, I was in contact with the league and had to do the whole "hey, can I skate with you?" thing, but they were really nice and helpful and said that I could. Yay.
Due to a policy that BAD has with visiting skaters and the fact that the Star System we use in Australia isn't identical to the WFTDA-approved skills test (or rather, that we don't have--yet--WFTDA leagues in Australia), I wasn't able to train with the actual BAD league. Instead, I'm training with the Reckless Rollers, which is their recreational league, made up of skaters who want to skate with BAD, or have retired from BAD, or people who are visiting, like me.
I had to contend with a street full of warehouses like this.
Anyway, so Saturday was the first training session I attended. They take new intakes every month, and then (as I learned) the skills get progressively harder during the month, and then at the beginning of the month they get easier again. But I'll talk about skills later. Anyway, the first thing you should know is that BAD trains in a giant shed in West Oakland. For someone who doesn't know anything about West Oakland, one of the things that you learn first is that it's a scary place.
I got there and someone let me in. It was weird being the new kid again, but I managed to find Mindi (who was the coach) and she set me up with some paperwork. I had to hand over money to cover training fees for the month and also for WFTDA insurance (which runs for a year, so I'll be covered this year if I want to skate with a WFTDA league anywhere, hooray). While I was filling out paperwork and whatnot, people had started doing the warmup. Basically, the warmup was as follows:
5x running laps of track
Sideways crossover hop things, kind of like this, for 5 min:
Agility ladder: in/out both feet, 5 min
Skips with high knees, 5 min
Stretches
The agility ladder was kind of neat. Basically, BAD's training grounds have a couple of agility ladders bolted into the ground so you can do drills before you skate. The one we did was like this: you go in the square (made by the side and the rungs) with one foot then the other, then out on one side of the ladder, then back in, then back out. I thought too much about it and stepped on my own foot and Mindi had to pull me aside and explain to me what we were doing. D'oh. Embarassing.
But yeah, doing 5 mins of sideways crossover hopping thingies and skipping around a track is surprisingly tiring. But then after that it was time for skates on! How exciting. Although this is a rec league, a lot of people had fancypants skates. Nobody was on stock wheels that I could see. Mouthguards seemed to be optional, and people would walk around with their skates on without their helmets. Haha. But it wasn't too bad. Basically once you're on track, you're on track the whole time. We put our water bottles in the middle of the track for when Mindi called breaks.
The floor looked like it was made up of this stuff.
One of the first things I did notice though was that BAD skates on this
plastic tile track. It looks like lots of plastic jigsaw puzzle squares
assembled together on some interlocking thing, but they're not all
completely flat so when you skate on them it's like constant bumps. And
it's way less grippier than the wood floors I've been used to. Oh geez. Oh and then the first thing we did was a warm-up skate going anti-derby. Hahaha I saw everyone skating and was like OMGWTF DERBY IS BACKWARDS HERE but it was fine. We did that for a bit, and then split into groups and practiced stops.
We practiced ALL OF THE STOPS: Ts (OH GOD I HATE THEM), plows, hockey stops and tomahawks (which interestingly are called "tip and toe" or something here?). Basically you had to skate down the straight bit and stop on the turn. I basically sucked at everything. I did make a nice braking noise with my wheels on plows though. Also I noticed that tomahawks are done slightly differently here: we kind of go backwards and straight onto our toes, here they go backwards, then slide your toe stop onto the ground and so you're braking longer. Weird. Then we did the same thing but with slaloms on the straight and then turns. And then after THAT it was like 5 minutes of skating nonstop as fast as you can, slaloming through the cones on the straight and crossing on the corners. I didn't fall over (phew) but it got harder towards the end. I blame jelly legs + lack of coordination + not being used to the floor. But yay, not falling over.
And the finally, we did the shopping cart drill!! Haha, but not how we do shopping carts at VDL with one person you're pushing. Oh no. Here, you push a minimum of FIVE people. You do a lap of sticky skating pushing five people (and they don't help at all, and you have to sticky skate the corners too) and then you skate to the front and the next person pushes. We did this for five minutes or so, but at one point Mindi got on the front of the shopping cart and frigging plow stopped the entire lap so we went at less than1kph. Lucky I was not pushing at that time. But seriously, this shit it tough.
And then we were done! The training sessions were only about 1.5 hours (including offskates) but they were MEGA intense. Oh wait. I thought we were done. Then there was the warm down. There was lots of stretching, including doing that opposite arm and leg stretch thingy that kind of looks like this:
Remember, I have jelly legs and I'm doing this with all my gear on, including skates. We do a couple on each side, holding for about 10 seconds and then switching. And then after that it was pushups! Whoo. Normally I'm okay with pushups and I don't mind doing them. But we did like 10 normal pushups, and then we did pushups where you hold the "down" bit for 5 seconds, and then 10 seconds, before you pushed yourself back up (you could take your helmet and wrist guards off for this). And then it was pyramid pushups! One pushup, then two in a row, then three in a row, all the way up to five in a row, and then one pushup holding the "down" bit for 10 seconds, then 5 in a row again, then 4, and so on back to one. So basically I did like something close to 50 pushups, and this happens on a regular basis. Blah. I'm happy to report that I was one of about three people who managed to do all of these non-girly, although I was a bit wobbly on my toe stops towards the end. But yes. Hello beefy arms. Oh and then my shoulder and my boob muscles hurt the next day, but anyway.
Not done yet! Planks for 60 seconds! ARGH! Okay. And THEN we were done after planks. FINALLY. Then I crawled to my water bottle and lay on the track in a sweaty heap with some other people. I guess the good thing is that everyone is really nice there and supportive and about the same level of fitness so I was about middle of the pack. I talked to a few of the girls and they have a beer vending machine in the BAD HQ, and everyone kind of hangs out afterwards, so that was cool. Next time I'll take photos of the place so you can see it, but it was a really neat experience. (Of course, trainings are Sat/Sun so you have like either 1 day or 6 days to recover, bleh. But yay.)
So, I spent Christmas and New Years in Hong Kong, where I got to meet up with Colonel Slanders (and we had yum cha! Nom nom). Before I went, I looked up places to skate around there or leagues to skate with. THERE AREN'T ANY. WAT. I'd love to see a Honkers team at some future Blood and Thunder World Cup, but that doesn't look like it is going to happen. There seems to be some demand for derby though: check out the most recent posts in the Hong Kong Pro Roller-Skating Team Facebook page. Anyway, after being there, here are some reasons why Honkers needs to have a derby league, if it wasn't already obvious that anywhere without a derby league ought to have one:
5. The market exists for it already
LOLWUT
Hong Kong makes roller skates. Yep. Granted, some of the skates they make are pretty hilariously terrible but they have the resources to make good quality derby skates. So why don't they? I guess it's not that hard to get cheap materials and stuff, and while they're at it they could also make safety gear. They need safety gear for other forms of skate-related sports, so obviously there is a market for that sort of thing.
They also have a LOT of people who skate, but on ice or speed skate or artistic roller skating, which I gather is like figure skating but on quads. But they're pretty good at it. Because there aren't a lot of sports fields and stuff, people tend to do indoor sports like ice skating and this kind of thing, and then add to that the whole Chinese stereotype about overachievement and you have an army of skaters with mad skills. Seriously, check out this kid. I don't even know how old she is but HOLY CRAP:
What was that?! I mean, backwards crossovers, backwards shoot the duck, jumping transitions?!?! I really hate her skates, but mad props to her for being able to do all that on crazy crappy skates. I learned how to shoot the duck (forwards) when I was like 8, but then I forgot and didn't relearn it until last year or something. But imagine pulling those moves in a jam. Jesus. The best I would be able to do if I was jamming against this kid is maybe hipcheck her in the ribcage before she pirouetted away from me and did 10 million transitions while jumping the apex or something. I should just retire now.
4. Lots of flat spots
So much surface area.
Don't get me wrong. Hong Kong Island is pretty much a giant rock with some houses and stuff along the shoreline. That would make a freaking awesome hill skate, but I'm not talking about that. What I'm talking about is the large number of flat (and usually very nicely paved) surfaces that are around: basketball courts, subway tunnels, and, most of all, shopping malls. Yes. Given the stupid number of shopping malls there are (and how they all have nice atriums and escalators) it's amazing that people still walk to get places, when they could skate between the shops.
I walked around in a lot of malls while I was there, and a lot of the time I was looking at the ground and thinking "this would be a really nice surface to skate on". They're mostly tiled (and very well polished) so you'd probably need to use grippier wheels, but there is SO much flat space, all packed one floor on top of another. You could do like a race or something and start at the top of a building and do a lap of each floor, going down the escalator in between (or if you are game, running down the stairs on your toe stops). Now THAT would be a fun game. But seriously, there are so many atrium-type things and stuff that I'm surprised nobody's actually done that yet.
Also, Hong Kong airport is a HUGE expanse of flat. I almost wish I packed my skates just to go there. It's fricking huge and wide enough that you could skate around all the check in counters and people and luggage with room to spare. There's also the old Honkers airport in Kai Tak, which apparently still has all the runways and everything there (and which used to be one of three places in the world where pilots had to manually land the plane because the flight path was in between people's apartment buildings...!!) which might have been interesting to explore on outdoor wheels. But failing that, the new airport is also pretty awesomesauce.
So flat. So shiny.
3. Passive-Aggressiveness
One thing I found about people in Honkers was that they were SO polite. But, as my mother will tell you, behind all that politeness is some pent-up bitchiness waiting to explode in the right situation. I was at a street food stand once and one girl spazzed out and yelled at the vendor lady because she had to wait for TWO WHOLE MINUTES to get her cheese weiners on a stick. So she was like "hurry up, I'll miss my bus" and the vendor lady said "I have to cook these properly" and then the girl was all like "YOU'RE TAKING AGES TO COOK THEM BECAUSE YOU KEEP PUTTING RAW THINGS INTO THE BOILER!" and then the vendor lady was like "I THINK I KNOW WHAT I'M DOING" and then they were yelling at each other in the street about food poisoning and child abuse and everyone was staring and I was confused and wanted my egg waffles.
So normally it doesn't boil over and people are good at keeping their tempers in check, but when it gets to be too much, look out. Where better to let that out all that aggression in a safe environment than in derby? Oh, and I guess making a smashed cucumber salad comes a close second. It's not as fun as derby, but it tastes a hell of a lot better.
2. The Squat Toilet
Oh yes, it's hard to go on a trip to Honkers without coming across one of these bad boys:
Those foot ridges are not helpful for keeping your balance if the toilet is wet.
I never figured out whether you face forwards or backwards on these things. Basically you do a squat to when you pee or take a dump. Protip: for the love of Derby Jesus roll up the bottoms of your pants BEFORE you go into the bathroom stall. Anyway, basically you bend your knees to below a 90-degree angle, drop your butt (not so it touches the toilet, ew) and then do your business.
Sound familiar? Hello, derby stance!
There was a LOT of practice of this. Also, even the normal sit-down toilets were usually grody, so it was good practice to hover-squat over those. End result: beefy calf and lower back muscles and an ability to hold a stupidly low derby stance for a very long time. (Actually this is kind of important when you are being thrown in front of other skaters as a cannonball, or to just be low enough to not to get hit in scrimmage.)
Random sidenote: Apparently flat-footed squatting is something that comes more naturally to Asians or something. I'm not sure why, but I heard something about how the leg bones or ankle bones or something in Asians made the more able to do the flat-footed squat. I tried to find some scientific evidence of this online but this was as good as I got:
So we did a test – 100% of the Asians could squat with
feet on the ground (P<0.000063) while only 13.5% of North Americans
could (p<0.0000043). And of the 13.5%, 9% had part ASIAN ancestry in
them. The remaining one was a Yoga Freak.
I'm not sure what the sample size was, but this sounds about right from my experience with people in derby. It still sounds weird (and possibly racist?) to say that Asians are the only people capable of the flat-footed squat. In my opinon, I think it has something to do with having longer calf muscles or something, but I'm not a scientist. But I'm sure Dr. Chang-Goldstein (in the video on the right) is!
1. Ridiculous number of people on the street = one giant pack
Seriously. The population density in Honkers is something like 6,500 people per square km, which makes it the 4th most packed place on Earth. Compare that to Australia's population density, which is closer to 3 whole people/square km. No wonder there are like bazillions of people everywhere you look. And they're slow too. They tend to mosey around, stop and look at random things in shops or not really look where they're going (usually because they are on a cellphone or PSP or some other device) and all up get in your way.
Spot the lead jammer.
Also, then there are the CHILDREN. For some reason that escapes me, people in Honkers like to have their children in tow and use them like small, moveable barriers to hold up people trying to get around them. The annoying thing is that, in a crowd 5+ people deep, you can't see the kids. So it looks like there's an opening and you go for it, and then suddenly you are plowing into a group of children and their families, all of whom are walking at like 1km/hour. There is usually a line of them holding hands or something, and some of them are so small I can jump over them. Heh.
I found it a really fun challenge to make it through a crowd without touching any of them (not like that, you perverts). Like, weaving my way around people, finding gaps that I could squeeze through while throngs of people milled around me, and making it faster to some self-determined spot than some other random person (which happened to be easy, because most people seem to wander). This was fun, but not so much I guess for other people who were walking with me when I would suddenly take off. But this was definitely good jammer training. If Honkers had a derby team, they would EASILY have the most skilled jammers on the planet.
I also had a job interview in December, and because it was a US school the time difference meant that I was skyping with them at 1am. Interview prep is kind of stressful, but to relax I decided to take a break from it and go to training the night of the interview, which also happened to be my last night of training for the year. Of course, I decided to scrimmage (since it was also my first scrimmage back from injury). It felt really good to scrim again.
Sarge split teams for scrimmaging so that the PhDemons and Cheerbleeders could practice for their bout in February. I mostly pivoted and blocked since I'm not going to be at the bout and it'd be kind of unfair to take up time jamming when others could practice that. Anyway, at one point in the scrim I think Malice hit Junky (who was skating for the PhDemons) and she elbowed me IN THE EYE. She got sent off for the first ever block to the head at VDL, and I copped a black eye and a cut (maybe from the velcro on her elbow pad, or maybe from the force of the elbow splitting the skin or something?), and people brought me ice and were really nice about it but still, there it was, right in time for a job interview.
Oh yeah, and the interview was on a HD Webcam so they could see everything.
This is how it looked the day after, when I had iced it a whole bunch and tried to put concealer over it:
I like how it kind of looks like a smiley face.
Also, in that scrim we won and got the first-ever score over 100 points. Yay us.
I went to Melbourne at the end of last year and went skating at the Icehouse with ze boyfriend my and my awesome friend Eugene. Eug and I have been friends since we were both about 5 years old when our mums would take us to the Carribean Rollerama for an afternoon of rolling around and whatnot. It's better than watching TV, yeah? Anyway, at some point I stopped skating until I got into derby, but Eugene never did, only he switched to ice skating.
Is this like "roller disco on ice" night or something?
Anyway, I'd never been to the Icehouse before. It was pretty neat, with two full rinks (one was taken for a kid's birthday party though, boo) and a fake zamboni called an "ice cat" or something that was made in Taiwan. You could also get two different kinds of ice skates: the stupid tall boot figure skate type ones (defaul rentals) or for a $3 upgrade, get hockey skates, that seemed to be much more snug in the boot and also weren't totally guaranteed to wreck your ankles when you fell over. Actually, they were more like derby skate boots, but with a bit of material over your ankle bone as well (but not further up like figure skate boots were). Plus if you were scared about falling and cracking your head open you could rent helmets as well (or, if I had thought about it, I could have brought all my derby gear and been the most padded person on the ice or something). They also had short lessons every hour or so teaching people to skate once the zamboni had done its round.
Eug and ze boyfriend are both better than me on ice. Eug obviously skated, and zbf used to skate a whole bunch when he lived in Norway, so both of them were doing fancy things and skating around me. The last time I went ice skating was when I lived in Toronto at the beginning of 2010; a bunch of people I worked with (who also weren't Canadian) and I would go to a nearby park and skate on the ice and try to play shinny hockey; I really like hockey and I've got some stick skills and I can skate in pretty much a straight line. That was pretty much the level of ability of our non-Canadian ice hockey league. Once we found a bunch of Canadian kids to play with us and they totally schooled us. It's pretty humiliating being beaten by like 7 year olds, especially because they don't play with the mercy rule.
You can't talk about ice hockey and not put in a picture of the Detroit Red Wings.
This is them winning the Stanley Cup in 2008. They also beat Pittsburgh to do it. Yay.
But that was before derby. Back to the Icehouse: at first I found it hard to go from quads to ice skates. For one, ice is OBVIOUSLY way slidier than any skating surface, and you can't vary how much grip you have (like you can by changing your wheels). I found trying to ice skate in derby stance helped a bit but 1) nobody else does derby stance on ice and people thought I was being retarded and 2) at first my derby stance was really overcompensatory because the ice was so slidy so I looked like a hunchback. Oh well. Derby stance was also good for doing big long strides (well, as long as I could do them) so it wasn't like I was shuffling along the ice or anything.
Munty left knee, immediately after the "there are no toe stops
or kneepads in ice skating" incident
Oh yeah, also, despite getting tons of derby stance practice, I fell over. TWICE. Argh! The first time I think I
tried to do a speed skater start and didn't have good enough grip, and
the second time I lost control and was like "oh well I can use my toe
stops OH GOD THERE ARE NO TOE STOPS" and then tried to go into a control
knee slide ONLY THERE ARE NO KNEEPADS EITHER. Fuck!! So all I did was
bang my knee really hard, straight onto the ice. At first it didn't hurt
too much because it was cold, but then when we were outside it started
really hurting. This was also my good knee too. And then a nice big fat
bruise came up (pics to come).
Anyway, Eug taught us how to do hockey stops, only I can't do them without somehow ending up transitioning or something. I really like plow stops on ice though; if you throw your legs out fast enough you make these little shaved ice spray bits on either side and can stop pretty quickly. Transitions were harder because normally when I transition on quads I have enough friction to only go about 180*, but on ice you don't really so you end up doing a 360 (or in my case, a 540 which just looked like I totally intended to do that. Yay.) Also, crossovers were way harder; on quads you push from your inside wheels out, but on ice skates you don't have that luxury. Leaning into the corners still helped, but the speed/psychological barrier or not having inside pushers made it a bit tricky at first. I got it in the end though, yay. Slaloming was also fun, although I think it looks kind of weird on ice, especially if you backwards slalom (instead of doing backwards snowplows).
Anyway, skating was pretty fun, and I'd probably like to do it again. It took me about 30 mins to figure out how to translate derby skills into ice skating, but I think that would shorten over time. Also, I kept wondering what ice derby would be like. Well, not actual what-is-now ice derby, but like roller derby on ice, obviously. It'd probably be something like ice hockey but without all the goals and giant pads and pucks and stuff, but yeah, that would be mega cool. Actually, I'd also settle for doing ice hockey: if I could skate better, I would really want to have a serious go at it. (Also because Australian ice hockey leagues are pretty small, so there'd be lots of room for kick assery.)
WTF? "Ice Derby" is apparently a real thing, and it looks like this?!?!
