Swork it baby, yeah

We've had some pretty bad weather the last couple of days, so right now outside looks something like this:

Brrrr.

At least the dog seems to be enjoying herself.

It also means yesterday and today I was literally trapped in the house since there was over a foot of snow outside my door and that involved lots of  pushing to squeeze out. Bleh. So there was a lot of pushing and lunges and whatnot to get the door open. And then I had to shovel a whole driveway, which turned out to be pretty good exercise for my core/back/puny arms. So even though I can't get to practice, there is still working out to do!

Stupid twerk face not included.

But if I was REALLY unable to even go the 10 feet around my house, I can still do some sort of exercise at home. I've downloaded this neat app for my phone called Sworkit. (Yeah, so whoever came up with the name was trying a portmanteau of "Circuit Training" and "Workout" and came out with some weird thing that sounds like a weird form of twerking or something.) I don't know, the word "twerk" is gross to me; it just looks aesthetically unpleasing. "Swork" is not much better. Oh well.

But anyway, basically Sworkit is a pretty customizable workout thing that you can do without very much space and without much equipment. The only thing I've seen that you might need is something to step onto for step-ups, but otherwise all you need is enough floor to stretch out. And if you want you can mix things up by adding weights that you might have around the house (read: skates) or whatever.

You just type in how long you want to work out for, what you want to do (stretching, cardio, even some random yoga stuff) and then it will set up a workout for you. And if you want you can mix it up, so like 5 mins stretching, 20 mins cardio, 10 mins stretching, or whatever.

Here is a list of all the exercises you can do. On your phone, there's even little pictures so you can see what you are doing, and if you get the upgraded PRO version (for 99c!!) it gives you access to youtube videos so you can see form and whatnot, and a nice British sounding robot lady who will tell you when to do the next exercise.

Heh, there's one called "Skater". :D

Okay, some of that shit is HARD. But I guess also if you're doing this then it also has the added bonus of keeping you warm when it is cold outside or something and thus lowering your heating bills while you stay in shape. Yeah.

Apparently derby isn't a proper sport, still

So last night, the awards ceremony for the best female athletes in Australia took place in Canberra. I remember voting for this: basically, there was a poll open to the public to name the best athletes (across any sport) in Australia, in an attempt to boost the profile of women in sport.

The top 25, and an article about it, is here. There are a lot of good athletes--Australia does have a very strong sporting presence--but what is notable is that ShortStop (who was voted MVP of Team Australia at the Roller Derby World Championships last year) won the popular vote, but didn't even make the top 25. Her name is in the "and here are the other people who got voted on" bit at the bottom of the article.

Shorty at Blood and Thunder, with the other MVPs

Of course, the women who did make the top 25 are fantastic athletes--they are world champions, Olympians, superstars in their own right. I think that they certainly deserve to be up there. But what pisses me off is that Sports Hydrant, the organizers of the event, put this to a vote, and then "moderated" the result. I also like how the reporter for the article describes the potential result that a derby girl could have won the popular vote as "alarming". Really? What's the point of asking the public to vote, if you don't care about the result they will give you?

What this suggests to me is that roller derby is still not seen as a legitimate sport. Even though it's clearly really popular (and certainly more so than, say, shooting paralympics which made the list), there's still something it is lacking before it will be recognized as a sport in its own right. I have no other explanation for why such moderation had to take place, but then I wouldn't know what was going through the minds of the organizers.

Consulting other halls of fame and sporting records (as the organizers did) disadvantages roller derby, which does not have an Olympic presence (most of the other sports listed do), or at least have a well-established championship. Blood and Thunder--the roller derby world championship--is only a year old. Of course, the current reincarnation of sport itself is also relatively new. But it is a sport. It demands just as much athleticism, strength and strategy as any other sport on that list. What else needs to be done to show that it is a legitimate sport, and not just some random passing fad?

I honestly don't know what justifies taking Shorty off the list. CRDL is the most successful sports team to come out of the Australian Capital Territory. Team Australia got congratulated in parliament by the Prime Minister for their performance at Blood and Thunder. I also don't see the point in trying to boost the profile of women athletes if you take one of the most popular sports that there is for women, and publicly strike down one of its most successful players from a list of the top female athletes in the country, in the one sport that has been primarily developed by women, for women. I think it's extremely disappointing that this happened, but in a way I'm not surprised that it has. I just don't know what else needs to be done for derby to get the recognition that it should have.

Update: Okay, according to this article, it's the fact that people wear fishnets and have derby names that makes it not a sport. Really? Try telling a boxer that boxing is not a real sport because they wear little silk shorts or have nicknames for when they are in the ring.

This shit is bananas.

Okay, so the NRV all-stars are having their opening bout tomorrow for the season. I'm on the bout production committee, and my job (at least for this bout) is to make some snack baskets for the teams and the refs. We have baskets; all I have to do is fill them for about $30.

Also now all the food has been on the ground next to my
stinky gear. At least everything is prepackaged. I call this
a food handling win.

I feel a little bit like a waterboy doing this. Also, I have an idea of how much a derby girl or boy eats (a LOT), and feeding that many people for virtually under $1 a person is pretty tough. Plus, you want the things to be nutritious to some extent, and/or be good sources of energy. And THEN presumably they've got to be relatively easy to eat; something prepackageed and edible with hands (with stinky wrist guards on, ew) would be the goal.

So off I went to the store. Shopping on a budget is hard; shopping on a budget with nutritional restrictions is even harder. I had to get lots of things that were on sale or were cheaper if you had a membership card from the grocery store. I actually ended up spending something like $38 but got a fair bit, and there are leftovers for next time as well. So this is waht the baskets look like:

The baskets don't look super terrible when they're filled.

This is what they have in them:

• Bananas (obviously)
• Chocolate chip cookies
• Peanut butter cookies
• Peanut butter cracker things
• Cheese cracker sandwich things
• Berry trail mix
• Random assorted mini candy bars
• Gummi bears
• Potato chips (you could get an assorted box of snack size ones for $10)

I assume I don't have to get each person one of everything; presumably these are supposed to supplement food that they already have with them. But yeah, I managed to cram them all into the baskets, and then also have some left to make a snack/thankyou box for the announcer (who is driving from Charlotte) and also possibly feed the NSOs.

Oh, and I also got a free box of cake mix from the store with some random store coupon, so tomorrow I'll make cupcakes for the NSOs; it's like they are always neglected in these cases and they work pretty damn hard. And that way I'm feeding pretty much everyone who has anything to do with the bout for under $40 because I am a champ. :D

FREE CAKE. YOU CAN KEEP YOUR NASTY HEALTHY FOOD.

 I just hope it's enough food for everyone... it's not like I'm Jesus or anything and can do magic food division.

SASHIMI AND BREADCRUMBS FOR EVERYONE!

Random reminder that I am in the South: when I went to load up my cart with bananas, the guy who was stocking them was looking and said "are you making banana puddin' or something?" and I said no and explained why I needed like 20 bananas, and then I was like "damn I really want banana pudding now, because that shit is tasty." I love southern food.

Ab Fab February

I've been a little bit bleh with my fitness at practice, so Leap Year and I are going to try to do Ab Fab February. It's basically a workout you do every day (Sunday being breaks) where you start with something pretty easy (yesterday's was 15 sit ups, 5 pushups and a 15 second plank) and then increase that workload throughout the month.

The exercise chart looks like this:

I've done 1 and 2 already, so it's rest day, yay.

I think if I really tried I could do the 25 pushups and 100 situps etc. now, but I'd be angry and tired and this way it'll make me do more exercise overall. Plus if I did them now there would be no motivation for me to improve. I'm quite bad at exercising by myself (e.g. I'll start a run and then be like "fuck this, this is tiring" and go home), so having someone else doing this as well who can be my exercise buddy will hopefully help!

P.S. Hahaha Leap Year is called Leap Year because (obviously) she was born on Feb 29. So for her this-year birthday, her present to herself is 100 sit ups.

Beefcake.

So, at Season's Beatings, in my attempt to be an athelete, I got that big ass bottle of gatorade and some muscle milk. I don't know if drinking protein shakes and whatever is effective, but if it helps me recover faster and fix my muscles and whatever, then hells yes. I also tried to eat things like protein bars and peanut butter and banana sandwiches to get my energy up.

No.

Last week, I bought my first actual pack of protein shakes. I don't want to be like super muscly or anything, just have a better recovery time after my muscles get a workout. I feel like sometimes if I skate really hard then it takes me a day or so to recover or at least stop feeling sore, so I want to improve on that. General conditioning I think will help, and so will stretching after practice (which is what BAD taught me but I've not seen any other league I skate with do that), as well as eating better.

I've generally been a pretty healthy eater. I don't really like candy, and I'm definitely not one of those women who will sit in front of the TV and eat an entire block of chocolate or whatever. But I know I don't eat very much meat and don't get protein from that. I eat mostly carbs, and my favorite foods are pretty much all carbs. Before Beatings I accidentally carbo loaded the whole week before instead of a few hours before. Oops. Yeah, I'm not good with that sort of thing. But I do want to lose a bit of weight so I have less to carry when I'm jamming, and also make it lean muscle so I can take and give a few hard hits.

So I've started drinking these protein shake things:

Fancy science shit in fancy sciency looking packaging!

It's like 500ml, so I drink half on my way to practice, and half immediately after, and then usually I have dinner when I get back home, maybe about 30-40 minutes after practice.

Importantly, it doesn't taste like ass. It doesn't taste like rich dark chocolate either, but we'll see. Anyway, I've been doing this for the past week or so and I don't feel beefier or anything. I guess I need to do this longer and more consistently to see if it's improving my performance. Maybe I will just be super beefcake in the next few months or something. Or maybe this stuff is just going to make me ridiculously flatulent. We'll see.

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.

Blood and Thunder!!!

I like how it is an emu and not a kangaroo as everyone would expect.

Unless you have been living under a rock for the last couple of months or so, you should know that the first ever roller derby world cup is on in Toronto! It started early this morning Australian time, and it will be going for the next three days. You can watch the bouts live from DNN here: Click here for awesomeness

I'm mega excited about this. Having an international tournament for roller derby raises the profile of the sport, and makes it clear that it is something that's not just played by a handful of 400-pound lesbians (which is actually how someone tried to describe it to me once, really), or that it's all like in "Whip It" when people go about punching each other or something like that, and it gives the sport a greater degree of legitimacy and visibility. Derby girls are actually athletes, and this is a pretty good opportunity to show the world what they can do. Plus, on a more obvious and less philosophical note, it's like all these amazing skaters all descending in one of my favorite cities in the whole world. Fuck yeah. My brain is exploding from all the awesomeness. Or maybe it's because I'm mega-hungry right now.

There are a crap load of countries actually taking part in it, so besides the obvious USA (of which there are two?), Canadian, and Australian teams, there are also teams from Finland, Argentina, Scotland, France, Brazil and Sweden, among others. I probably would have liked to have seen representation from parts of Asia, like Japan and Korea (because I KNOW they have teams there, unlike China or Honkers which don't have any derby to speak of) but hey, this is the first ever international derby tournament so if this is what it is going to be like in its early days, imagine how awesome it would be in years to come.

Here's a video of Team Australia's first bout of the tourney against Team Germany:

Shortstop is frigging awesome, around the 2min mark. I also like when the person taking the video is all like "scheisse!!" randomly. Ha. Australia also won 136-53.

Team Australia v Team Finland is on in like 35 minutes!!! USA v New Zealand in 15!! I don't think I will be doing much work this weekend. Also, now I know how my housemate felt when the Rugby World Cup was on for like a month (he's a Kiwi, go figure). :D

Almost famous!

So about a week and a half ago Rubi, Boudica and I got interviewed by a local magazine about roller derby and our impending roller disco fundraiser. I have a suspicion that the reporter was secretly interested in doing derby herself, and that's why she got that project.

But yeah, the interview was fun, and getting to gear up and talk about derby and then also pose for a bunch of photos while we were all in our derby gear and looking badass and everything was kind of awesome. It's my first interview in regards to being an athlete! Hahaha. I should have flexed my (beefy T-rex) arms for the camera more.

You can read all about it here.

Haha, I come off as being so administrative in the interview. She did ask me a lot about the numbers of members and stuff, and it was weird and nerdy that I could just rattle those off from memory. Heh.

Ch-ch-ch-changes

Not my biceps (yet).

I’ve been skating for about 4-5 months now. At first it was just once a week (an hour on Sundays), but now I have a regime of two on-skates training sessions and one off-skates fitness session per week. The two on-skate ones are two hours each, plus one has a half-hour of light off-skate fitness. The actual off-skate fitness session is an hour of strength and core work, agility and endurance drills. We do box jumps (hilarious because I am the shortest person in the league and I have to jump boxes that are up to my thighs, and those same boxes are mid-shin for some people), kettlebell workouts (two-handed swings, weird Turkish getup things), ladder runs and a shit load of squats. Pretty much it’s 10 reps of each, in a circuit. Then, there are sit ups, front/side/back planks, push ups, lunges, sprints and god knows what else. Oh, and then on Friday I deadlifted my own body weight. Fuck yeah. And my arms aren't hurting anymore now, either.

One thing that I have noticed is that my body is changing. Not in the pubescent “I’m growing boobs” sense but in the sense that I am actually developing muscles. Or rather, I am getting back the muscles I used to have from serious-hockey-playing days. That’s a welcome return. My thighs are pretty fucking beefy, relative to the rest of my body. My ass is less flabby and bony, and more firm, according to unspecified sources (woohoo, derby booty). I still have stupid T-Rex arms, but doing more weights and push ups will fix that. I think I’m currently the heaviest I’ve ever been (barring poor eating habits at the end of high school due to exam stress), but I’m okay with that because it’s mostly muscle.

And today I saw that I have lines on my back. Like, tone lines, fuck yeah. I would like to get some of those on my front so I don’t have a beer gut. I often measure the amount of fat I have on my stomach by scrunching the fat and skin around my belly button and seeing how big of a butt shape I can make it go in. I know that’s gross, but I was inspired when I saw it once on an episode of Jerry Springer years ago, so go figure. (By the way, I really fucking miss that show.) Happily, the gut-butt I can make now is substantially smaller than it was six months ago. Fuck yeah.

Welcome to Team Pie, where there are at least 1.3 pies per person.

My metabolism is also going kind of crazy. After I skate I am a fucking eating machine. I can inhale a burger and fries like nobody’s business, and after our weeknight skate sessions we sometimes have Team Pie night, which is a bunch of us hanging out in McDonalds and devouring a fuck ton of pies and burgers and attracting the attention and ire of weirdos. Last week at Team Pie I ate three burgers, two things of medium fries, two things of medium Fanta (I hate coke) and half a pie. Fuck. That’s actually kind of disgusting. Plus if Team Pie is a weekly event (which it has been the past month), it’ll soon become Team Bowel Cancer. This week I skipped Team Pie for a slightly healthier option (oven bake fish, oven bake fries, panfried asparagus, chocolate milk). I think it’s about the same volume of food, but I actually feel better the next day about it (both in terms of diminished sluggishness and guilt). If I can eat well and continue working out as much and as hard as I am now, I’m kind of excited to see what my body will look like in another 6 months.

Quodpot Update

On Saturday we had that quodpot game (that I mentioned in this entry) against the Uni Dragons. The game itself wasn’t really that important (and that’s not because we lost 3-1), but holy shit can we really live up to the derby girl stereotype.

Not a sweatshop.

But let’s start a bit before that. So, despite the fact that quodpot was a 5-minute game, I think we’ve put in a total of at least 10 hours of effort into things like procuring warpaint, shopping for boutfits, planning and strategy, painting shirts, making team pie and general awesomeness. On the Tuesday before, a couple of us scoured factory outlets and sex shops for appropriate things to make boutfits out of. I don’t know when things from sex shops would ever be “appropriate” in non-sexual contexts, but here you go. Fishnets, frilly knickers, tutus and plaid miniskirts and hotpants were on the agenda (I don’t think we actually found any hotpants in the sex stores, wtf). Then on Thursday, I had to submit the names of the team to the HPC people, and they thought what we had come up with was pretty hilarious. Yay. Then on Friday, after fitness training, I had the quodpot ladies come over and we painted our shirts and ate pie and generally had a fantastic time.

Fuck yeah, homemade strawberry pie.

And then Saturday we basically rocked up two hours early to get our boutfits and warpaint on. Most people did the football-style black/red stripes across their cheekbones, but I opted for a big fat black vertical streak over one eye. In retrospect it just looked like I had hair over my face like an emo kid, so maybe next time I’ll try it in red. Junky brought her kid and we warpainted him too. And then walking out onto the field was seriously awesome. The reaction we got was fantastic, from both the HPC and other random people like parents and announcers and the reporters from the uni newspaper. The only exception was at one point when a little boy saw my shirt and asked his mum what a “golden snatch” was. Titter.

Fuck yeah, Smashkaban. (Photo: Rachel White)

We had our own rollout too! I gave the announcer person our HP Derby names and she read them out as we ran onto the field. She stumbled over “Whore Crux”. Actually, what’s with so many HP things that can be punnified into including the word “whore”? Like, really. Uni Dragons had something lame like “Player 1, Player 2, etc.” kind of thing. So, before we played quodpot, we totally won on awesomeness points there. And we looked a fucking lot better than they did.

The match itself was kind of tough. We had a good strategy I think, but I just couldn’t hipcheck this beefy dragon boating boy who was marking me. I tried and I would just bounce off him. He was seriously about twice my size. Juking worked really well, however, and I managed to get a quodpot (is that what the water balloon thing is called?) into the bucket by just twisting around him and then running like hell. Haha. My only regret was not smashing more water balloons onto the Uni Dragon guys when it became clear that we weren’t going to win. That would have been much more derby girl-esque to do methinks.

Oh noes, I am being chased by a beefy guy. (Photo: Rachel White)

But it was a good day. We got heaps of great publicity for the league, and we’ve had people contact us and want to join on account of our presence on Saturday. And we got to strengthen our ties with other university clubs, so maybe we’ll get to do more inter-club things like that. We also invited the HP people to skate with us too. I suppose quidditch on wheels is pretty close to roller hockey.

Oh yeah and then Hufflepuff won. Fuck yeah.

Here's an awesome photo montage video thing that Eleri did. I can't embed it because I don't know how to, and blogger only gives me the option to use YouTube. Boo.