The First

In honor of the new recruits that started derby practice last night here’s my recollection of my first practice and maybe some of the newbies will agree.

First, I ate too much at dinner before practice. Mistake. Second I felt like my whole body was shaking! I was so nervous to lace up my skates! What if I totally sucked?! What if I wasn’t in good enough shape? God, please don’t let me fall! And what’s the first thing I did once I hit the track? Yep, I fell. Right on my butt. The embarrassing thing about that was that I wasn’t even moving! I was just standing there! And flip! There go my feet over my head. It wasn’t pretty, but I got a round of applause for the first fall of the night, got up, and shook it off.

Next were static exercises. Um…..ouch! Mimicking skating movements while static on the carpet really gets those leg muscles burning! Little do you know how important those muscles will be later as you advance through practices. Then come the dreaded toe stop exercises! Jumping jacks, running man, high knees! All on a one square inch piece of rubber attached to my toes! After that we finally got on the track to skate! We did right foot push, scissors, snow plows. My feet were numb the entire time because I had laced my skates too tight. At the end of practice I had Elvis legs. You know, where you take a step and your leg does a little shake and your knee feels like it will just buckle. The next day I was sore, but super psyched that I had finally started and couldn’t wait until the next practice! To this day I am still sore after every practice and my mantra during practices is if my lower back isn’t on fire, I’m not in good skater position!