Sunday 30 September 2012

When I grow up, I still want to be lead jammer.

Yay, so today we scrimmaged and I jammed for the first time with NRV. Jamming was initially intimidating here just because people are much better than what I'm used to, and it's just like people would know who to hand the jammer panty to next. Today, when we split into teams, there was only one person who self-identified as a jammer, and two others who were "occasional" jammers, so they were just like "yeah have a go" and I did.

The first time I didn't get lead, but there was a nice fat wall of four blockers and I FUCKING JUMPED THROUGH A HOLE between them. Like, My feet were off the ground when I got through the wall. Whoa. The second time we did a different scenario (2:2:1:1) and the other jammer (who was Speed Junkie herself) was totally toying with me, but she was also jamming defensively (i.e. like a third blocker). But again, squeezing through holes is totally going to be my bag. I got lead there, AND NOBODY GOT MUNTED. Thank you derby Jesus. And then afterwards some of the freshies came up to me and were like, "you did reall good, Mouse". But yeah, it was fun and the moral of the story is I need to stop being so self-doubty and step up. I definitely want to jam some more in the future.

Using size to advantage FTW!

Friday 28 September 2012

Eastern Region Roller Derby Smackdown

I am having the biggest fucking proud right now.

Last weekend it was BAD, and this weekend is all about reppin' VDL and the Dishonour Rollers:
I think I am trying to look fierce but I just
look disgusted and many-chinned.
My time at VDL was relatively short and while it was in its infancy; I never did any bouts (they all happened while I was overseas), and the only thing I did that was remotely representative was be on the DishRollers team for the Cannery Challege interleague scrimmage last year. That was already a big deal. But now VDL has sent a team to a FUCKING TOURNAMENT and are actually doing more bouts than they have EVER done before in one weekend.

The final score was CRDL C 155 to VDL's 151. But that's the closest margin we've EVER had. I bet everyone there is over the moon about it. At this rate they'll probably win their next game! And definitely the afterparty. Oh god I wish I was at the afterparty.

It's taken time but the team has needed it to come together, I guess. I know I'm not part of it anymore, but it is awesome to see people who have been just starting out a few months ago make it onto the rep team and kick some ass. It's like seeing the baby league all grown up and dishing out some awesome smackdown of its own. Dawwww.

Anyway, I am in particular extremely proud of my awesome derby wife, who captained the Rollers this time around. About a year ago, we were just rolling around and being freshies who were shitty about failing white star tests and not getting put in the same cohort as people who we started with but were better than us. But fuck, she's now the freaking captain of the travel team! And she went in as a triple threat. A year ago, Boudi wrote a blog post about how much she wanted to get to the point where she could bout. She said:

I want to be a bouting derby skater. I want to be able to tear up the track as a kickarse jammer. I want to be a great blocker, able to give the kind of hits that silence the crowd. I want to be a pivot who seems to have eyes in the back of her head. I want to be really good at this amazing amazing sport, and I want it so badly I could burst. The idea that I might not be capable of it is heartbreaking.

But now she is all that, and more. So in a way, ERRD's not just like "yay she made it onto the travel team and is the captain", but it is much more "yay, she kicked a lot of ass to get there, and all that effort and learning has paid off, and she is far more than capable of all of this." She is a fucking inspirational superstar.

Look how far you can come in a year of derby. It makes me so proud right now. Okay, I may or may not have something in my eye.

And that goes for everyone on the team. You've come a long way. I am so fucking proud of you all.

Sunday 23 September 2012

Controlling the pack

Today we did some scenario work in scrimmage, like when you have two blockers and the other team has four, or whatever, and we kept mixing up the numbers. I like these scenarios; it makes it much easier to see when to do what play. I'm still kind of a derby strategy derp though, so having stuff explained helps. And then I write it here so I can remember it and stuff.

This is what I got out of scenarios like 4:3 and 3:2, if you are the team with the more players:

1. If you have control of the pack (i.e. more of your players), there are a bunch of different things you can do to help your jammer. One thing that Smack said was that you should speed up and get in front of the other blockers, such that if your jammer is lead and coming up on the pack, them she can score the points off them first without having to try to get past her teammates.

2. If the other jammer is a while away, you can also force a split pack while the other blockers are holding your jammer. That way they'll have to release her before you need to jump in and stop the opposing blocker. (Of course, if both jammers are really close to each other, there's no point in splitting the pack since you'd have to yield to both jammers, but the above point about being in front of the other blockers still holds.)

3. Another thing you can do is stand on the side of the track (probably the outside) in a line until your jammer passes and then swing back in to form a wall before the opposing jammer comes in. This will prevent your jammer from having to crash into her own teammates, and thereby save a bit more time for her to get around the track.

4. Importantly, because you already make the pack, you don't need a goat to make up the numbers. Obviously. But it might mean that your blockers could get goated, so keep your eye out for that.

5. You also control pack speed, so you can speed off (not too ridiculously though) to make the opposing jammer work harder for her points. But it's tricky to do this and not also tire out your own jammer if the opposing blockers also speed up to try to catch you.

Yay. I'm slowly learning. I'm still a rollerderp but I think I'll get it eventually!

Saturday 22 September 2012

Peeling the Banana

Yum.
I like this drill but I'm quite crap at it. If you know how to tomahawk, hockey stop or plow, then you should be okay to do it.

Basically, you start with two pace lines, and you go at some speed that works for everyone. If you want the drill to be harder, you go faster. That's pretty easy. It's fun though if everyone is roughly at the same skill level. If not, put the people who are fastest at the beginning of the pace line and the slower people at the end. Or at the very least try to pair up the people in the pace line so they are with someone of a similar skill level.

Anyway, so you have your two pace lines moving together. On the whistle, the pair of skaters at the top of the pace line each "peel off" the pace line (but they should still stay within the track lines, so make sure the pace lines are actually in the middle of the track), so you basically stop with a tomahawk, hockey stop or plow, skate to the end of the line and then rejoin the line.

So it looks something like this:
And rinse and repeat. It gets tricky if you
try to send through multiple pairs.


If you tomahawk, you should also switch sides so you can practice transitioning both ways before you stop. But the faster you do it, the harder it gets. I have a bad habit of flinging my arms around to try to help me stop and I almost punched someone in the mouth. :/

Friday 21 September 2012

BAY AREAAAAA!!!

BAD are playing tonight in the WFTDA western playoffs for the championship! They're seriously the best team I've ever seen play, in terms of having amazing teamwork, and their athleticism and skill is nuts. I remember going to one of their league bouts and spending  most of my time with my mouth hanging open and screaming "OH MY GOD DID THAT JUST FUCKING HAPPEN" when crazy shit was going down on the track. Derby in the US is way faster and harder than what I'm used to in the land of Oz, so seeing the best teams in what's currently undisputedly the best derby country in the world is pretty fucking amazeballs.

Also, Demanda is pretty FUCKING AMAZEBALLS. Sigh...
(photo credit: D.E.sign)
Oh, also, the Oly Rollers are playing in a few hours, and if they beat Rocky Mountain, they'll play BAD next. That'll be interesting, given the amount of shit talk that has been going on about them, especially in, well, the Bay Area. Hellarad did an amazingly hilarious writeup of it here.

Anyway, here's me reppin' down in Virginia, on the other side of the country:


Whoo! I might also have to wear my other BAD shirt to NRV training on Sunday for extra reppin'.

The bracket for the Western Region playoffs:

Or if you want a downloadable .pdf version to print out and fill in, it's here.

Wednesday 19 September 2012

How to win friends and influence people


I'm a little bit of a social idiot. Like, I have basic social skills, so if we go out for lunch I'm not going to poop on the table and stuff. But I find it hard to actually fit in with groups, much less stick with them over time. I find friendship to be somewhat demanding, and I don't like small talk or banter or whatever that you need to actually insert yourself into an existing group. Luckily, I have wonderful friends who are forgiving when I drop off the grid for years and then come back into the group as if no time had passed. That's why my friends are awesome.

Anyway, it's hard to fit into groups for me, especially if 1) it's a long-established group with its own dynamic and 2) I'm the only new person and everyone already knows someone else. Well, that's what it's like joining NRV. We skate around and do warmups, and apart from one or two people, nobody would really talk to me and everyone else skates around in a big pack chatting and I'm just this lone person on the opposite side of the track or whatever. It's tough. I mean, it's still early days and everyone is nice and nobody is a dick or anything, but it's hard to know where to fit in, right?

The little piggy still has socks on because
presumably fresh meat need rental skates.
Tonight was NRV's recruitment night. What that meant was that we had regular training, but people interested in derby could come and watch us train and ask us about stuff. NRV trains at an actual skating rink, so there were plenty of hire skates and pads for them to try on and roll around with later and whatnot. We did our normal warmup and then some drills (which I'll write up later), and then we went and introduced ourselves to the newbies (the new name got a few laughs, hooray) and talked to them for a bit, and then they got gear on and we did a little bit of a demo scrimmage to explain to them what was going on. If you were benched while a jam was going on, you could sit amongst the newbies and explain to them what was going on and whatnot, and then at the end there was a social skate and we skated around with them and taught them how to do things like snowplows and whatever.


So, a few things. Warmup was still kind of antisocial, as was our first drill, which was the in and outs (I'll write these up in a bit). There are a couple of fresher meat people that I talked to the first few times before I was allowed to scrimmage, and they're still nice and I talk to them. There are also a few newer team people who recently passe their skills test, but they were all in the same cohort so tend to stick together (see--COHORTS ARE IMPORTANT). Anyway, when we wet to  I was benched with a few of them and what, people were actually talking to me! In fact, Priss was like "WHOA YOU'RE AUSTRALIAN" and then wouldn't let me shut up because she was so excited by the fact that I had an accent. And she just never knew because I had never talked to her.

And then I realized two things:
    1. I am not as new as the newbies being recruited. So I can't be all wimpy about being new and shit like that.
    2. People actually want to talk to me if I take the time to talk to them.
Admittedly, because I'm a social moron I probably didn't talk to people because I thought that they didn't want to talk to me, and so on. But once I realized that then training was actually fun. Like, I could be all shouty when the jammer was coming up without thinking that people were thinking I was being a bossy bitch, and I even talked to some of the new people and taught one how to sticky skate forwards and backwards. And she thanked me and said she'd come back to another training. Yay.

But the best part was when they put music on and it was stuff like Love Shack and I wanna dance with somebody or whatever which is fine, but then I was skating by a couple of other people and we all started singing the Gangnam Style song, and doing the dance. I think it was more or less spontaneous. It was really weird. But yeah, that was fun. And then we all had the song in our head so we did the dance again. Also, surprisingly, nobody fell down.

If you have no idea what Gangnam Style is, please watch and learn:


Obviously NOBODY had ANY idea what the hell was going on or what he was saying or anything, but it was fun and we all laughed about it and I actually felt like I was bonding with the people I was skating with. And it's all because we've all individually watched some video of a chubby Korean guy doing some weird horse riding dance thingy on the internet. And we've all watched it about 20 times and know all the bits to it.

By the way, the fast sideways running bit is HARD to do on skates.

And then afterwards there was food. Some of the NRV ladies had made food to bring so we could all sit and share a meal with the newbies while we geared down and stuff. Man, southern cooking is fucking fantastic. And the NRV peeps must really like their league if they're going to make like 20 different kinds of food for it. So yeah. Good food, good times. And then we did Gangnam Style again but off skates. Yay. I am happy.


Clockwise from bottom: mac and cheese, peanut caramel blondie thing
(like a caramel brownie), jam and vanilla frosting cookie thing, tiny
tiny hotdogs, pastry thing with chili beans and cheese, plastic fork, more
M&C. Nomtastic.

Tuesday 11 September 2012

The "oh god I'm going to die" drill

Okay, I have to admit that right now I'm slightly tipsy after having gone out for drinks with some of the peeps from derby. Beer here comes in giant 20 oz glasses; that's like one of those really big two feet tall glasses things. I didn't take a photo this time but I will next time. And I had two of them. Before my turkey burger and fries arrived. And I hadn't eaten since about 4 hours before training. Wheeee.

Anyway, we did this awesome hitting/blocking drill tonight. Basically you have half the people in a pace line skating close to the inside line, and the other half were skating around the outside, or the middle of the track. The ones skating on the inside line are supposed to hold the inside line, while the outside line basically come in and take potshots at them. Like, they skate alongside you and then just come in to hit you. Then they do it from further out so they have to swoop you as well. And you had to take the hit but not hit back. Ow.

I was on the inside line and every second skater would come by and hit the shit out of me. And they hit hard. My right side is all crunchy now, and at one point I got laid on my ass. But we also practiced leaning into the hits and preempting them (i.e. leaning into the hit), and that worked better. It was a crazy drill, and I was so nervous and anxious throughout it waiting for the next hit, but it was good to get some smashy in. Yay.

But then we went out for beers and everything was okay. Yay. I'm drunk on a weeknight after a hard day of teaching. Whooooooooo.

Monday 10 September 2012

The Chairman has arrived.

I don't have classes on Monday, so normally I hang out at home and do some class preparation and stuff. I was sitting outside my house reading and the mailman came and had a delivery for me. My new helmet decals had arrived!

Also, I intentionally picked a Chinese-looking font.
It's called "Wonton". Ze Boyfriend says it's racist.
Okay, so firstly, you'll probably notice that they say "Chairman Mouse". Yes, I am officially changing my derby name. I submitted a thing to TwoEvils a few months ago, but they're working on January now so I won't even know if it is official for ages. But I don't really care, since we don't care about 2E now, do we? I think the new name's been growing on me, since I thought of the change. I like that it's a play on "Chairman Mao", and since I'm Chinese and probably going to be branded a communist in this country, it was fitting. And I get to keep the "Mouse" part because I'm little. Also, I like the idea of having a dictator for my derby alter-ego.
 
The thing to do was obviously to stop doing work and put the new decal on! Yes, I actually did this. My poor students. Oh well. I had prepared for this day last week by buying some rubbing alcohol, some wet/dry paper (like sandpaper, but finer) and some hardcore cleaning shit called "Goof-Off" which removes shit like gum from carpet and stickers and anything from anything else really.

Anyway, in with the new and all that! So, the first thing I had to do was take off the old derby name and number. The name wasn't so bad, since originally what I had done was print out my name and use a big piece of packing tape to stick it down. I have a white helmet, so the white paper on the white helmet made the black text stand out a fair amount and it worked okay. It did get a bit grubby over the year:

Also, I'm keeping the stars. I worked hard for those.
Peeling the tape off wasn't so bad except that it had kind of fused to the helmet in a goopy sort of thing and only came off in tiny strips. The bit under the actual name with the paper was probably the cleanest part of my helmet to date. It was all still shiny and bright white and not covered in scratches. I gave it a bit of a clean with some paper towel and rubbing alcohol and then that was pretty much done:
It looks like a giant shiny egg. For my egghead.
I have to admit that it was a bit sad, taking away one derby identity and replacing it with another one. Or at least taking that one away and then having nothing there. :( Maybe I'm just an old sap like that. But that said, the back of the helmet still looks the same as before. I'm not a huge fan of sticking craploads of stickers and whatnot all over my helmet, so I guess this is all I'm going to have on it:

F is still for Fucking Awesome.
The derby number was a fucking bitch to get off. For one thing, I had used strips of duct tape originally, but then they fell off, leaving that cloth strippy stuff underneath but no color, so I had just colored it in with a paint marker because that was faster than making new duct tape cloth strips and possibly duct taping my hands together (which is what happened the first time). I had to use rubbing alcohol and a towel, and it took ages. I got impatient and used some wet/dry paper, and that helped although the dissolved bits of paint marker got into the the little scratches so it ended up getting a bit gray, and then I had to buff that out.

This bit was a fucking pain in the ass and took over an hour to do. I also ended up just using the Goof Off shit for the 3, because that wasn't going anywhere and by this time I'd used half a bottle of rubbing alcohol and the fumes were making me slightly high. Also then I knocked over the bottle of rubbing alcohol and got it all over my front steps(since I was responsibly doing this in a well ventilated area) and then also burned my leg on the metal edge of the step to the house while I was trying to clean that up. I'm kind of surprised and thankful that none of the rubbing alcohol got onto the cat that lives downstairs, and directly under my stairs at the time. Anyway. Don't huff chemical fumes, kids.

After having all these weird chemicals on my hands I also went
and ate lunch. Because I am a viking. Or an idiot.

FINALLY, when I was done, it was time to put the new decals on! One thing to note is that I originally had my name/number around the opposite way from what most people do, which is that your name is on your right side of your helmet and your number on the left. (I guess this is because when we started doing derby, Sarge would stand in the middle of the track and to see our names he needed them on the left, not the right. But when you are skating past audience members on the outside of the track, you'd need your name on the right so they know what to yell out.) So I had to reverse that.

I got my decals from TLKelly Graphics from Etsy here. That one's just for one color, but I got the fancy two-color one, so it was considerably pricier, at something like $28. Like, whoa. But I figure that I was going to be a grownup and spend responsibly... not. But they look fucking good and they were quick with the order and design so yeah, why not. I actually emailed them to ask what the font would look like (since the font I'm using is custom and not one of their standard ones) and they did some mock-ups for me within the hour. Then we changed font sizes and placement but yeah. I liked it enough to jump on the wagon the next day.

The first one I put on was the number, since that was smaller and the area for that was relatively clean. The hardest thing about putting decals on is that you are effectively putting something that is flat and two-dimensional on a curved three-dimensional surface. The problem also with decals is that you press down parts of it and they actually stick to the helmet and not to the adhesive thingy that they came on and then you're like FUCK and have to wonkily stick the whole thing down.

But the number wasn't too hard, I guess:

It still looks like a mouse, in Wonton font.
I think I would have liked it a litle bit further forward, but whatever. It was stuck down by this point. The name was a fucking pain in the ass to put on though. I have a pretty small head, and therefore a pretty small helmet, and it was hard to position it right so that I wasn't going to have the name spill over to the MUNT bandage on the back or the monster face on the front. So that was annoying. Also because the decal is fucking huge, it was much fiddlier than just the number. After some wrangling and use of scissors and swearing, I managed to get this thing done:
 

I fucked up the "M" in "Mouse" a little bit because there was a huge air bubble at this point but nothing I could really do about it. This is why when I was little I never bothered to put that Con-Tact shit on my books because I always fucked it up with air bubbles in it and whatever. Ugh. But yeah, it does look pretty fucking awesome, despite the imperfections. I love the font with the black outline, and I like that it looks kind of comic booky as well.

Overall, I think it's pretty good, although $28 (plus $1 shipping) is probably a bit steep to blow on something like this, especially if you're not the kind of person who is good at putting decals on helmets and might fuck it up. I guess for that price you could get a decal and pay someone to put it on your helmet for you in a way that won't induce stress and swearing and air bubbles. But whatever, it's on the helmet now and I fucking think it is rad.

P.S. This will mean at some point I will also have to change the name of this blog, but we will get to that point later. I'm still getting used to the new derby identity.

Thursday 6 September 2012

Breaking the pack

So because of the awesome efforts of the executive and training committee at NRV and VDL, I was cleared for scrimmaging even though I haven't done my WFTDA test yet. Eeeee! Scrimmaging takes place at the end of the training, and I was pumped for it. But because I am awesome I happened to hurt my crotch hip flexor at training doing a hockey stop, so I decided to sit out scrimmaging. Boo. :( But I did learn some things about pack-breaking from Goliath while I was watching.

Basically, the thing to do these days is scrum starts. That is, you've got your jammers on the jammer line, and then your blockers are pretty much lined up on the jammer line as well. And one team will take a knee right on the jammer line to release the jammers right away, since if one team is on their knees you've got no pack.

In this AWESOME diagram, K= knee start:

In this case, Blue is forcing a no pack and the
jammers are released immediately.

But then you can also have no pack if the pack is split. So if everyone is at the jammer line in the scrum start and one blocker skates to the pivot line, the pack is split, and the jammers are released. (Of course, then that blocker will need to skate back to reform the pack, but still, a no pack.)

Red blocker has split the pack, so there is no pack, and
the jammers are released immediately.

However, if everyone is on the jammer line and a blocker goes to split the pack, and then a second blocker (at the jammer line, on the same team) takes a knee, then the second blocker has broken the pack and gets majored for it.
I couldn't convey "you shouldn't do this" so I wrote "Boo" instead.
 
Basically it seems that the moral is that either your whole team has to be at the jammer line and on their knee, or someone has to be on the pivot line and everyone is on their feet, but not some weird combination of both.


I'm pretty bad at derby strategy, so even getting my head around this took about 20 minutes. And I'm not sure I got it right. But maybe when I scrim on Tuesday I can actually be part of this and it'll make more sense.

Monday 3 September 2012

New kid on the... river

I just got back from doing my first training session with the NRV rollergirls. It was pretty fun, and I'll talk about some of the drills and stuff we did below. But first, let me just get something out. OH GOD THE HUMIDTY HERE IS KILLING ME. IT IS FUCKING HORRIBLE.

This is how I would do the weather report if I were a weather reporter.
Training was at 10am today and already when I woke up I was all clammy. Then walking the 20-or-so steps to my car and getting in the car made me sweaty. (I guess this is also because the inside of the car was pretty warm.) Anyway, then we skated (indoors, thankfully, and it was somewhat air conditioned) and I was all sweaty and sticking to things like the floor, other people, the pads we hit in the hitting drill, etc. And then when it was done I had to go outside and it was so humid my sunglasses fogged up and it was just like walking into a wall of wet heat. The drive home was pretty bad; it's only 10 minutes in the car but I stuck to EVERYTHING in the car. I wanted to punch a million babies. Seriously, the training isn't super hard, but the acclimatization might take much longer than I thought.

Also, the heat made me drink three bottles of water (so, about 2-2.5L) during training. Then when I got home I had to pee like a racehorse.

The thing on the left with the stars is the DJ booth.
Also there were like 7 mirrorballs on the ceiling.
Anyway, so, NRV training. Firstly, I picked a really good/bad weekend to go since it's Labor Day weekend (tomorrow is a public holiday) so a lot of people weren't there. It's held at a place called Adventure World, which seriously reminds me of when I went rollerskating as a kid at a rink in the 80s. (Warning: their website also looks like it was made about that time and is loud and obnoxious.) They even have carpet with rockets on it. I met Seam, who's the president, and Pumpkin (secretary) and Blighty (who was the person I had been corresponding with and she's British and pretty nice and an awesome skater) and a couple of newbies and some of the refs. The refs also skate with us and do the same training, which is cool. BAD and SCRD weren't like that. But again, because it was Labor Day weekend, it was a relatively low turnout, maybe about 10 people in total. (Which is fine for me since I'm kind of socially awkward.)

On Sundays, NRV also does a thing where they spend the first hour and a half focusing on newbie skills. Basically, newbies have a thing called the "Fresh Meat Sheet" which breaks down basic derby skills into 10 different levels. Level one is really basic stuff like being able to stand on skates in derby stance, and level 10 is stuff like being able to take full-force hits. Level 6 is learning how to do hits, and once a skater can do that then they can do blocking/hitting drills with the big kids, but not scrimmage yet. Also, after they finish the fresh meat sheet then they qualify for taking the WFTDA minimum skills test. I guess they really are covering all their bases. Anyway, so the focus for Newbie Training is to have the fresh meat go through different things on their sheet and get them checked off, but everyone takes part in the drills.

What pages 1 and 3 look like of the Fresh Meat Sheet.
They printed double sided so I can't get 2 and 4 in the
same picture.
Not to be confused with the Crazy 88s.
We started with something called Crazy 8s for a warmup, where basically you sticky skate around the floor. Blighty would call out things like "slalom" or "scissors" and that's what your feet would be doing while you were skating. Then occasionally we'd change direction too. We did this for about 5-10 minutes.

That was to get everyone warmed up for the 25/5, which was the Fresh Meat skill they were working on today. They get to do it in 6, or for the level 4 freshie they do 12 laps in 2:30. I hadn't skated for about two months so when I got into the endurance thing my legs were like "YO BITCH WTF ARE YOU DOING" and I was tired by lap 10 already. Ugh. But I managed to do 25 in 4:37, which I guess isn't too bad. I need to stop coasting on corners when I'm tired because I am a lazy fuck. I would still like to be able to do 25/4 but we'll see.

After that, we had a bit of a water break and while that was happening, Blighty set up a bit of a course around the track. It looked something like this:


And we did things like this:
1. You had to step sideways through the cones, kind of like doing side hop things.
2. As you came into the first turn, one of the refs was there with a pad and you had to do either a hip, shoulder or full body check on him.
3. Slalom inside and outside around the turn
4. Do grapevines through the cones (alternating legs)
5. Here was another ref on the outside line that you hit (also Seam would yell out what kind of hit to do on him)
6. More slaloms and then you were done.

After that, we did something called the "Two and Thirty". Basically that meant we skated around and did 2 minutes of a drill, then, 30 second recovery, and then repeat. We practiced stops (I STILL HATE T-STOPS) and falls and tomahawks, only here tomahawks are called "backwards double toe stops" or something. It was weird. I've heard them be called about four different things now.

Completing the FMS means you can do
WFTDA min skills testing and scrim. Yay.
After that, we paired off to do some positional blocking drills, just basic 2-on-1 stuff. It was pretty good. I was paired with one of the newbies who had just finished her level 6 stuff and could do a lot of the blocking but didn't hit or scrim. Since we were only positional blocking, that wasn't going to be too bad, right? Well, then I threw her into the jammer a bit hard, oops. But it was effective. Then I got busted for low blocking the jammer because I clipped her wheels and she fell over. Blargh.

Finally, suicides. Now, these are not like any suicides I've ever come across. They're a cross between suicides and pyramids. So you had to lie on your stomach and on the whistle, get up and do two laps up and back down the rink, and then do 20 crunches. Then lie on your stomach, get up, do three laps, then do 10 burpees. Then the same but four laps and 10 pushups (and everyone else did girly pushups so I am awesome). Then the same with five laps and a 30 second plank. Then back to four laps, and a 30 second squat, and so on. I did okay in the drills and except for being really crap at tomahawking and turning around quickly. I also got jelly legs towards the end and tried to tomahawk on my off-leg and ended up falling on my face. Ugh. Good thing I can get up quickly. :P

Anyway, so that was all of training. It was fun, and the people are nice. I don't have to do the fresh meat stuff and I'll be going in as a transfer skater, so hopefully at the midweek trainings this time I can meet the coaching team and also see if I can do my WFTDA skills tests (AGAIN). I think I might be good enough to at least get drafted to their pool, if not their B team. Whee.

Update: It's apparently 92 degrees (almost 33 in Celsius) and about 80% humidity outside. KILL ME NOW.

Update 2: I just drank a fuckload of sweet tea. I am in the south after all. (I also ate half of this loaf of challah, but that is another story.)
FOOD OF DERBY GIRLS EVERYWHERE.


Saturday 1 September 2012

Still impatient.

So, apparently my health insurance kicks in at the beginning of the month, which is today. So I should be insured let's say, were I to go to derby training tomorrow. I don't have any evidence of insurance though, but it's only newbie training for the first hour and I could sit out the scrimmage/contact stuff if I didn't want to do that, right? :P

Fuck it. I'm going to derby training tomorrow for the first time here. I'm scared, but I figure the sooner I get into the swing of things, the better. Also, I want to freaking bout and learn some new skills.

Also, in other news, new derby helmet decal with new derby name ordered!!!