Bout v Chemical Valley

(I know there was a photographer at the bout, but I haven't found any photos yet, so I haven't posted them. Plus--as you'll see--chances are that most of them involve me getting my ass kicked or my face punched in.)

So our last bout of the season was a B-team bout against Chemical Valley in Charleston, WV.

Due to some previous stupid shit, our bench was much, much shorter than we had anticipated. We played with only nine skaters, which meant that there were a lot of back-to-back jams for people. Lindy and I were primarily jammers, so we went in every second jam, with Ape occasionally coming in as a relief jammer when we got too buggered.

And hell did I get buggered. First of all, I was told to be in the first jam of the bout, and I am REALLY not good with that. I usually take a while in the bout to get my head in the right space, so being told I was not only jamming in the first jam of the bout but also doing that slow-mo demo jam before hand was seriously like a deer-in-the-headlights moment for me. I was nervous about fucking up the demo jam, hahaha. Ugh. I hate all that stupid winding-up-to-the-bout stuff that happens, with intros/national anthem/demo bout stuff. I just want to start skating dammit!

Lovely rink rash from sliding on the concrete, or is that
just from someone's velcro? I don't even know anymore.

But when that happened, shit was tough. The first two jams CVRG broke first and got lead, so we didn't get any points on the board until the third jam when I got lead jammer and put five points on. Then it was a slow crawl up the scoreboard, but at the cost of getting seriously pummelled. I don't know why but my ankles and shins were super killing me (I think it was playing on concrete and banging my toe stops on it when I was running, or something?) and as I got tired, I got stupid and sloppy. In fact, at one point I cut track, got sent to the box, came out (the other jammer got sent to the box), cut track again, got sent to the box AGAIN, then the next jam started when I had 0.16 seconds left on the box so I came out and immediately backblocked the shit out of someone, then got sent to the box AGAIN. I was sent to the box THREE times in two jams. How fucking embarrassing. UGH. I wanted to punch myself in the face.

But after all that time out I got my shit together and didn't have any more penalties for the entire game. Yay. And I didn't need to punch myself in the face because my face (and the rest of me) was suitably tenderized by CVRG. They have a pretty big team, so my face was a prime target for elbows, fists and shoulders. Surprisingly, I didn't get a bloody lip this time, but I did get elbows to the eye, and shoulder blocked so hard in the face I had someone's number on my cheeks. I got at least three people boxed for high blocks. I also stopped counting how many times I got hit in the face after about six. :P

Lovely face bruise, complete with blood pooling.

The best one was an elbow to the meaty part between my cheek (like the bottom of my eye socket) and my eyelid. Apparently the refs were going to make that an ejection but then they rescinded it. :/ But I got ice on it and after a while my field of vision got a bit obscured by puffy eye meat. Lovely. I took the first four jams of  the second period off, while I was trying to sort out my shit. But once I had had a bit of a rest, I did feel much better going in. We racked up a few more points in the second period but didn't end up winning. No biggie though.

The score differential was so much that I don't think we really cared. On the B team we don't get to do a lot of bouts, so I think most of us were just super stoked to be bouting at all. It's hard to get practical bout experience if you're not an A team or bridge skater, so being able to have our own bout (with some A teamers helping us out of course) was a very exciting experience. And there aren't really that many just B team skaters, so sometimes it doesn't feel like we get a lot of bout time, or bouting experiences. So I think we just wanted to get out there and skate, and we really did. We busted our asses out there and tried our hardest, and it showed. We were still learning, and it was still fun for us even if we got our asses handed to us on a plate. We didn't care about that.

Oh, but this was the best bit:

The mug was actually full of Kit Kats,
but we ate them on the ride home in the RV.

Seriously. I vaguely heard them announce it after the bout and I was just like, "WAT" until somebody (Psycho? Shilo?) told me to actually go up there to get my award. Haha. I'm so dumb. The cynnical part of me wants to say that it was because CVRG felt bad for punching me in the face too many times. :P But whatever it was, this was a seriously humbling experience. I totally never expected anything like this because all I wanted to do was jam (and not get pummelled too much).

But yeah, hooray. :) And that's the end of our season!