Ice skating is now hard.

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?!?!