Climbing Mountains

I started this blog almost a year ago. Looking back through the posts I've written, I'm surprised that I never talked about one thing that seems to be common to all rollergirls: bout day jitters.

Mine, of course, are not content to be bout day jitters. They start early. It's more like bout week jitters. I was nervous already at practice on Wednesday, and I certainly, shall we say, did not have my head about me.

From there, I've descended into madness. Difficulty sleeping because my thoughts are racing. Today, I woke up with a stomach that was certainly not purring with contentment. It was twisting, turning, dancing like there was a midget inside banging on the front walls of my guts, begging to be let out. I know I need to be calm, but every time I think about tomorrow, my heart skips a beat and I feel a little bit like I'm gonna barf.


To some extent, that's all normal. Nothing that I haven't experienced before, and nothing that doesn't go away after, say, the first or second jam you play.

But I feel like I've always had trouble with making it go away. When I play in a game, I keep a running tally in my head of every mistake I make. The more I think about the stupid mistake I made in the last jam, the worst the next jam is. So on and so forth.

Cho mentioned something at practice not too long ago, something that the team's old coach Maria used to talk about. I remember hearing her say it, if not the exact words - every jam is its own jam. Every jam, you start out 0-0 against the other team. Every jam is a new opportunity for you to do your job.

I've had such trouble remembering that. When I don't remember it, I turn into a train wreck out there, visibly getting angry at myself when I don't see a jammer, swearing like a disgruntled hobo when I miss a block.

In the spirit of what my teammates have done (see recent posts by 9 Pound Hammer and Cho Cold), I am setting goals for tomorrow, my first bout with BCR.

Tomorrow, I, Mary Helley, commit to the following:

1. I will be aware of my mental state. I refuse to overanalyze everything I do on the track looking for a mistake. If I do something I know was wrong, I will correct it if I can. If I can't, I will put it out of my head until it's time to sit down and unpack what I learned over the weekend. If I find myself freaking out, I will force myself to take deep breaths. I will not allow anxiety to rule the day, because I am prepared for this.

2. I will not eat crap before the bout. One of my Derby Resolutions this year was to be more aware of what I was putting into my body because the quality of the fuel determines the quality of the performance. Sometimes, I have been damn near determined not to listen to that, but tomorrow is not a day to play fast and loose with dietary rules. I am NOT going to eat fast food before I skate. In fact, I'm starting off tonight by eating some carbs. Tomorrow, I'm not skipping breakfast, I'm packing a lunch to eat in the car, and I am going to make sure I have something to eat at halftime - a protein bar or a banana, whichever happens to be available.

3. I will not allow myself to get dehydrated. I'll admit it: I get really excited during a bout. Even when I'm sitting out a jam, I tend to be on the sidelines screaming at my teammates. I forget to drink. And at no less than two of the three bouts I played last year, I got ridiculously sick because I was dehydrated. After Panama City, I had a migraine the size of Florida and puked for a good hour and a half before I could hold down some ginger ale to settle my stomach and get to sleep. After playing Pearl River, I had another migraine that I couldn't get to go away no matter how much I tried - and I had to drive an hour home afterwards, half blind because of the splitting pain in my head. Not gonna happen tomorrow. I'm starting on the water now, and drinking nothing but for the weekend. Maybe overzealous, but it's the most horrible feeling in the world to be that dehydrated after a bout when you're already exhausted.

4. I will not allow myself to get crampy. Last year, I struggled and struggled with muscle cramps. I could never quite get to a point where I didn't start cramping at some point during a bout. Tomorrow, I'm going to make sure I get plenty of potassium to start (either from my potassium/calcium/zinc supplement, or from bananas). I'm going to make sure that I don't skimp on stretching because I'm nervous.

5. I will not allow my temper to take over. I know this kind of goes along with the first thing that I said, but it's important enough to me to separate them out. I get frustrated at bouts sometimes, especially at bouts that start getting aggressive. And then I get angry. And then I turn into Helley Red Haze who isn't paying attention to anything but how pissed off she is. Tomorrow, I'm going to remember something about that part of me: she's not productive. I can get mad later if I need to. I can vent on the way home if necessary. But for one hour and twenty minutes, I have to keep my head on straight.

Going into my second season of roller derby, I've never won a game. I've never even been on the winning side in a mixed scrimmage. And now I'm skating with a team that had a pretty damn good record last season.

If we lose tomorrow, I'm not going to be heartbroken, though I want to taste a win. The first one will inevitably be the sweetest. What I want more than anything, though, is to know that I overcame the neurotic over-analytical nerd in my head that wants to criticize every move mid-bout.

The only person who can prevent me from picking up that win is me. And after writing all this about my particular version of bout-day nerves, they all of a sudden don't seem so unconquerable.

Losing It

It's bout season.

There's not much room to think about anything but when the next one's happening. Learning from the mistakes you made the last time you skated. Fixing your screwups. Learning new strategies.

This is the payoff. I've been with BCR through the entirety of an off season now, and now it's time to take all that hard work onto the floor. I'm proud of my team. We've worked hard, and we've trained well. I'm eager to see what happens when we put it all together and play other teams.

I've been extremely focused on the upcoming season. It's part of who I am to be driven. To want to do whatever I do very well. Joining a team like BCR, that's a tall order. It's taken all of my energy to train through this off season, and I like that. I want to be someone the team can rely on to handle her business on the track. I want to be an asset, have trained very hard to be an asset.

I found out today that in April, the whole BnB team is getting deleted from the international roller derby name roster at Two Evils. A couple of my former teammates (two of my three derby wives, in fact), messaged me about it today. They were really upset - it's like losing a part of yourself. It's a reminder that the team we worked so hard for is dead. There is no three second recovery for what our team went through.

Flash back to eight months ago, July. The inevitable explosion hasn't happened at BnB yet, but tensions are rising. We start a typical practice with another annoying skill drill: side step down one line, sprint to the other side of the rink. Sidestep down another line, sprint back. We do this for ten minutes at least - it seems like forever. I break a bit of a sweat, but mostly I'm just bored.

Next up, after we stretch, it's time for an endurance drill. It's just your typical 25 in 5; it's ubiquitous in derby. Sometimes it feels like we aim all our endurance training towards passing this one test.

The rink is hot. The air conditioning at Looney's never did work well in the summer, and it feels almost as humid in here as it is outside. Like you're swimming through the air. There's a nervous twitch in my stomach as I take the line. This drill always makes me nervous, almost sick. I know it's the one thing that would keep me from playing. Everything else on that test, I can do, everything. But the 25 in 5 is always a crapshoot.

The head ref (my husband) blows the whistle. We're off. I focus in on trying to pace myself and I agonize at how tired my body feels after only five laps. By fifteen, I'm slowing down. By twenty, my shins and calves are cramping so badly that my crossovers resemble limping. When I cross the line at 25 laps, my legs are noodles. I don't even have the leg strength to stop properly, so I drop to my knees, skid to a stop on the floor.

My heart is pounding. Sweat is pouring off my body, and I feel so hot that I'm having trouble not passing out. I'm panting, my breath sounding like loud, embarrassing gasps.

4:54. I wasn't the last to finish. I made it with six seconds to spare.

That, at BnB, was my accomplishment. Make it through the 25 in 5. Yes, I told myself, you may be a total wreck afterwards, but you passed the damn test. And that's what matters.

At least that's what I told myself. But when we took on PRRD a few weeks later, it seemed like a lot more than that mattered. I was one of the lynchpin players of the team, one of the only people who understood and cared about playing pivot. The team captain. I had to be in for a lot of jams. My team was depending on me.

I was exhausted before the first half was over. My body felt so bad I could hardly focus on putting one skate in front of the other, much less getting strategy together for my team. On top of that, my derby wife got injured and was in the middle of Ridiculously Bad Real Life Shit. To say I was unfocused is a massive understatement, and I felt very responsible for our loss. I was absolutely baffled when my team gave me the Most Valuable Skater award for that bout. It made no sense to me - it still doesn't, no matter how much I appreciate their love.

Derby is as intensely psychological as it is physical; it's a funny sport that way. I've said that over and over again because it's something that is always emphasized in my sport. I can't really speak for other team sports, but I've gotten to know that part of derby intimately. If your faith in yourself wavers, your opponents will sniff it out like a shark scenting blood. Believe firmly enough that you can't do something, and your belief will make it true.

It's not just your own fear, though. It's never just about you in roller derby. Other people's fears can affect your team's performance. I've watched fearful jammers linger in the back of the pack, praying for heaven to open up and give them a way through the pack that doesn't involve being in the sights of the other team's blockers. I've watched fearful blockers miss crucial blocks because they spent so much time calculating whether or not it was the right time to make a move. Hell, I've been that blocker.

What I didn't realize until far after BnB was over was that someone else's fear could affect training the way it did. I was so loyal to my derby wife. Endlessly so, in spite of how she may feel about that now; she wasn't in my head. She didn't understand how I rationalized everything she did because I was her derby wife. I was supposed to understand her.

I think I understand her better now, after I haven't talked to her for almost six months, than I ever did during my first season as a skater.

I think that as a coach, she was scared. We were alike in the fact that, however much we try to hide it, we thrive off the approval of others. If she admitted that she had never coached anything before, much less a sport as complicated as derby, if she admitted that she'd never been an athlete, didn't understand the way that athletes' bodies work, she would have risked that approval. How would the team have reacted to know that the person who had taught them how to skate, who had initiated them into this wonderful sisterhood, hardly had any knowledge about how to coach the sport beyond the basics?

We never got to find that out. But I think that we spent a season crippled by that fear. One of our referees was a former speed skater with wonderful ideas about how to incorporate off skates and endurance training, but my derby wife claimed that she had asked him to help her many times and that he wouldn't do it. I don't know whether that was true or not, and it doesn't matter - but I do know that she spent a lot of time running down his knowledge. What if he had been more right than she was about skating and how to do it?

Derby is a very open community. There's knowledge out there for the taking if you want it, and even a mailing list about how to coach a derby team with a massive archive that covers just about every issue you might wonder about. I begged her to join the mailing list, but she never would. What if she had discovered she had actually been teaching us the wrong thing all these months? What if she had discovered she had actually been focusing us as a team in the wrong direction?

When I started skating for BCR on October 5 of last year, I was a total wreck. I would have loved to blame my bad skating on the fact that I'd been off skates for a month, but I knew that if I were honest, there were just a lot of things I'd never trained for. My endurance wasn't the result of not skating, it was the result of never having done any endurance training, not in the entire year I skated in Montgomery. My lack of knowledge about strategy, my lack of ability in certain skills, the ineffectiveness of my blocks - it was largely a result of never having been trained in certain fundamentals.

It was, truthfully, largely, a result of having a coach who was terrified to admit that she didn't know it all.

I have my current coaches to thank for the skater that I am now. They have helped me unlearn bad habits by filling in the fundamentals I didn't know. Under their guidance, I've pushed myself harder than I knew possible. This team has made me want to be a better skater; it has made me realize that the best thing I can do for my team is to perform at the top of my ability. When I skated for BnB, I sacrificed a lot of my own training time to help newer skaters. I don't regret doing that, because every woman who wants the experience should know what it is to love derby. But I do regret not giving the team my best effort, not even knowing what my best effort felt like.

The last time I skated a 25 in 5, it was directly after skating 40 in 8 (I clocked in at 7:30, my best time on the exercise yet). I finished my 25 in 5 at 4:40, a better time than I made last July at BnB when the 25 in 5 was the only time trial we did. After my 25 in 5, I proceeded to complete a 10 in 3 with a fall at the end of each lap (2:28), and a 5 in 1 (:54).

This wouldn't have been possible at BnB. We were never pushed this hard at BnB. We were never shown the possibility of our potential. We did the minimum requirements of derby, and not much beyond it.

And that's why we lost every game we played last season. Badly.

I don't want to blame it all on her, our coach, my former derby wife. I am always responsible for my own performance, and I won't deny that that's a lesson I could have used last season. But derby is all about learning- about the sport, your team, yourself. I'm willing to admit that I was a poor player last season because I just didn't know.

I have to wonder what would have happened to the team if our coach had been willing to admit the same. Would we have been a better team? Would we have avoided the messy split that happened in late August?

It's impossible to say.

In a lot of ways, I'm thankful that it happened. I'm skating with a team that has never asked a damn thing about all the ridiculous drama that killed Belles. All that BCR has asked of me is my commitment. They pushed me beyond my former limits and forced me to ask myself how much I wanted to play this sport. That I'm rostered for a bout this weekend in Chattanooga is the answer.

The real tragedy in all this is that so many of my former teammates slipped between the cracks. That someone else's fear is keeping them from skating again. That someone else's fear kept them from ever knowing what this sport has the potential of being.

I would change all that, if I could. But short of erasing the past, I don't know the way to do it. It could be that this is another one of derby's sad stories - another instance where one personality soured countless others on a sport that is pure magic in its best form. I don't want it to be. But then, I can admit that some things are beyond my control.