I was reading one of my favorite derby blogs today, having nothing much else to do now that work has ended for the summer. The esteemed Ms. Bunny Low-browski said the following: "Accept the things you can't change and let that be something that distracts other people, you have work to do. Don't give yourself any excuse to not succeed."
Her post was advice for skaters who are skating their first bout. I'm a long way from that now, as weird as it seems. By my count, I've skated 7 bouts and 3 mixed scrimmages, but I realized as I read her advice that I sometimes still feel like a brand new skater, going out on that floor for the very first time. You would think, at some point, that the "new" feeling would go away, that I would somehow feel less freaked out about this whole bouting thing.
One of my teammates got really irritated while we were scrimmaging last night. She put her hands on my hips, pushed me aside and told me to "get the fuck out of the way." Presumably, she felt like I wasn't doing what I needed to do in the pack, and that she would have to take care of my job for me.
The harshness of her words wasn't what stuck. It was the insinuation that I couldn't handle it. And immediately, I started criticizing myself. Well, you are really off tonight, Helley, I said to myself. Nevermind the fact that my grandmother died last week, I had to miss a whole week of practice post-Red Stick bout to go up to Birmingham and help plan the funeral... that was no excuse when it came to giving myself the opportunity to chew myself out. To agree with her frustrated criticism of me as though it was handed down straight from the gods on high.
Bunny's words gave me something of a different perspective on the incident. All this self-criticism that I do (a lifelong habit) is nothing but my excuse not to succeed. Of course I'll let my teammates down, of course I'll skate poorly, because this is the best I can do.
Only it's not.
Succeeding in derby has always been more of a mental struggle than a physical one for me. And the physical part has been no picnic - going from a sedentary college student who had never played a team sport to where I am now has been a long, hard journey, and it's one that isn't near done. But the hardest part of all has been telling my brain to shut the hell up long enough for me to do what I do out there.
Lately, I've just been mired in it. Stressed out over everything I've had to do at the end of the term, and further stressed out by the unexpected sadness of losing a family member. I've been a sea of negativity, firmly believing that every time I go out there, I'll perform poorly, and you know what? I've been an accurate predictor of that, because every time I've told myself something negative, I've believed it.
I know I can't turn it off like it's a lightswitch. But what I can do is stop giving myself excuses. Every step I take forward as a derby skater is another step towards defeating the crushing negativity that sometimes seems like an overwhelming black wave threatening to inundate me.
On Sunday, I have a lot at stake. I knew about the Tragic City Rollers for a long time before I ever met any of them. I read about roller derby on the internet, and I wanted so desperately to be a part of it that I could hardly stand it. But while I lived in Birmingham, I never went out for their team for one reason only: I was scared.
I was determined to stop hesitating and take the opportunity when a fellow MA student (later to become Paina Skully) invited me to the interest meeting for BCR in fall of 2008. On that day, I fell in love with this sport and the people who do it for real, for keeps.
Since then, I've fallen and gotten up, literally and figuratively about a million times. I tore a meniscus, sprained an ankle, and came up with more creative bruise shapes than I ever thought possible. I believed in myself, stopped doing it, then struggled to do it again. I have cried over derby, laughed myself sick in the stomach over derby, made friends and lost them over derby.
It's my third season of roller derby. For the past three years, roller derby has been a part of my life, whether on the sideline or encompassing every moment. It seems like so long ago that I first stuttered my way onto a skate floor, sweating and burning through derby position exercises that felt, at the time, like they were going to kill me.
Our team founder, Cho Cold, wrote a post on her blog recently discussing how even since the beginning of her derby career, she has had a hunger for knowledge, and a desire to be better that has kept her going, no matter the situation, no matter how much she wanted to quit. When I read that, it reminded me of something. Or rather, someone.
It reminded me of me. I remembered how for years before BCR was ever even an idea, I wanted to skate on a roller derby team. I remembered how even after I probably shouldn't have been skating that first season, I kept putting myself through it because I wanted it so badly. It was incredibly foolish to keep skating on a torn meniscus, but I just couldn't get roller derby out of my head. I wanted it.
It's the very same reason I went to Montgomery. When I realized that these girls wanted me, well, I wanted them too. They wanted me to skate for them, not ref for them, and I thought I would burst with joy. I felt like someone in roller derby wanted me around as much as I wanted to be there.
And this season, with BCR, I've felt like much more of a beast than I ever could have with BnB. The weekly practices we have are practices that, last September, I could not have handled. I would have quit less than half an hour in. No matter how ridiculous I feel out there with the amazing athletes on my team sometimes, I know I'm better than I was.
And I remember how much I wanted it when I first started. How much I wanted it before I first started. How much I still want it.
The real truth I've learned in the past week is that roller derby doesn't throw you out at the first screwup. Or the fifth. Or the fiftieth. Roller derby opens its arms to take you back every time you are willing to get up and keep going. Or, more specifically, roller derby players do all this.
Because one thing that's become increasingly clear is that it's not my team that expects me to fail. It's been me. When my team gets frustrated with how I play, it's because they are expressing a faith and a belief that I can do better. It's because they've seen the progress I've made since I came back to BCR. They don't over-analyze every mistake I make (sometimes they may not even notice them). I think I've been harder on myself than my team could ever be.
I'm not the star player on the team, the one that everyone is awed by. I doubt I ever will be, and to be honest, I don't really think I want to be. But what's more important to me than any of that is making sure that I get that negative bitch inside me to shut the hell up so that my teammates never have a reason to doubt me again.
I'll be taping her mouth shut Sunday when we play TCR. I've got something to prove.
Showing posts with label injuries. Show all posts
Showing posts with label injuries. Show all posts
Thursday, May 19, 2011
Wednesday, May 4, 2011
Feeling the Burn...Out
Thirty-five minutes until practice starts. I wish I could crawl into a hole.
Saturday, we have a bout against Red Stick Roller Derby. The thought makes me nervous in ways that playing against Greenville, a relative unknown to me, did not. Greenville handed us our asses in ways I'm pretty sure that Red Stick will not. But still, there's a lingering memory associated with Baton Rouge, one that I know my teammates don't share. They were never in that position to have it in the first place.
C'mon, Mary, that was right in front of your face! You're not gonna call that?! What the hell is wrong with you?
I remember wincing, maybe visibly. FFE, Red Stick's coach (whose full name is perhaps best not spelled out for impressionable eyes), had been on my case for this entire bout.
By half-time, my eyes were brimming with tears. Back in the ref room, I bitched bitterly about how disrespectful he was, and how I couldn't concentrate with him riding my ass every time I did (or didn't) make a call.
Come to think of it, I'm not actually sure I made any calls in that game. I'm not sure that I raised that whistle to my lips even once to call a skater off, or even to call off a jam.
The first time I ever reffed a bout was one of the worst experiences of my derby career. It certainly wasn't as bad as the second bout I ever reffed, but that's another story for another time. I hadn't transitioned from rollergirl to ref that long ago, and I knew without a doubt that I was not ready to ref a bout. I kept telling myself that.
I'm pretty sure my lack of confidence showed. For a ref, that's a deadly disability, and rollergirls will prey on it. I didn't understand the interplay between teams and referees, the way that during a game, rollergirls will not only cuss you out but curse your entire family line, and then be totally fine at the after party. It takes a while for refs to get to the point where those insults roll off their shoulders. Some refs never get there. I imagine that plenty quit under the strain of that load.
When I think about Red Stick Roller Derby, that's what I remember. Being absolutely terrified of skating as a ref, but being forced to do it because (surprise!) they hadn't brought any refs with them, and hadn't thought fit to tell us until they set foot in the Skate Center. I'm at least Facebook friends with many of their skaters now. Meeting them face to face, I understand now that they're not the ten foot ogres they seemed when I reffed that bout.
But, I know that this weekend will be no walk in the park. Red Stick is a WFTDA Apprentice League now. They've been trained by some of the smartest and best in the sport.
***
Thirty-five minutes after practice, and I'm not sure what to make of what just happened to me.
When practice started, I felt short of breath. I figured that had a lot to do with me, you know, missing about a week of skating due to tornadoes or the mass of papers sprawled all over my office floor, one or the other. No big deal, right?
Uh, wrong.
During our warmup (our damn warmup, for gods' sakes), I sat down, panting for breath. During our second drill, I practically collapsed on the sidelines. My breath sounded like a noisy hacksaw, I was dizzy, my knees were weak, and a steady tattoo of I can't, I can't, I can't was pounding against my forehead.
That same summer, the one I described above, the one of that disastrous Red Stick bout (and my second disastrous bout), I started having panic attacks.
They were frequent. My thoughts raced, one after the other, taunting me because no matter how hard I focused on calming them, they wouldn't slow down. My hands trembled, my heart pounded, my breaths were shallow and quick. I felt like I was dying. The way the terror rose up in my throat and exploded into my brain was like nothing I had ever known before.
I couldn't do anything. Watching TV made me have panic attacks. Reading made me have panic attacks. Playing World of Warcraft (which was one of my only outlets that long summer) made me have panic attacks. It was literally impossible some days for me to get out of bed. I couldn't sleep, but being awake was torture.
More than ten times a day, I'd feel them coming on, and my body would start to tremble. Endless fear, endless overreaction to things that shouldn't have mattered. I couldn't make them not matter.
When I skated, I'd forget about those things for as long as I was at the rink. Reffing isn't for me, I know that now, but without it, I don't know that I would have left the house that summer. In a very real way, roller derby (and BCR) held me together at a time when all the seams were popping apart and nothing made sense.
That anxiety was crippling, and I doubt I will ever forget what it felt like. It reared its ugly head inside my chest tonight. It leapt up from what I thought was certain death like some perverse black phoenix and said hey jackass, remember me?
It's like some fated movie showdown between good and evil, only I'm not really sure I'm either one of those things, but just me, my surname being entirely appropriate for someone who's somewhere in between most things, content to be neither this nor that, but to exist unlabeled and unquantified.
One drill I sat out because it was a race. I knew my heartrate would get up again, and I didn't trust myself not to freak out. But halfway through it, when it was my scrimmage team's turn to go do burpees while the other team sprinted back and forth, I just said the hell with it and went and did burpees with my team.
It was like flipping a breaker into the off position. Once the current quit flowing into those neurons at breakneck speed, I just skated. I skated and I hit people and yeah, I definitely nailed some people in the wrong places, and yeah I definitely didn't always pay attention when I should have, but it was about more than that for me tonight.
Panic Disorder (if that's what I even have - maybe it's just what they call "Generalized Anxiety Disorder," which never seemed like a very helpful label to me) isn't something that just goes away. You can treat it, but it's more along the lines of managing than it is disappearing it completely.
I knew someday I'd have to face it again. It's ironic that it's rearing its ugly head right before our bout with Red Stick, the very bout at which I started to discover that something inside of me was going very wrong.
I take a low dose anti-depressant every day, and I have for almost two years now. If things get bad, I have a mild anti-anxiety pill that I can take to stave off the panic attacks. Usually, I only take one a day, with my anti-depressant, but either way, I'm tethered to those little orange bottles because sometimes even with them, I don't manage the condition well.
One of my greatest fears once that summer was over and I'd finally gotten some relief from it all was that it would come back one day. It's not realistic for me to expect to never have issues with anxiety again, or even to expect that I'll never have a panic attack again. Tonight was a jolt that reminded me of that fact.
There's one thing I've learned since 2009, though, and much, if not most, of the lesson came to me from starting to skate derby, which I didn't even have the courage to pursue until long after my knee had healed.
It's perhaps best phrased with the tag line from Treme: "Won't bow, don't know how."
If there's anything that I know about myself, it's that I'm a resilient person. I've been through far too much bullshit (there's really no other way to phrase it) than is worth recounting in this blog, but I'm still here, "bloody but unbowed," as it were.
I've been apprehensive about playing Red Stick ever since I saw our season schedule way back in December. Maybe, though, it wasn't Red Stick that I was anxious about. I had a sneaking suspicion, and after tonight, it's becoming a certainty: the monster in the closet may actually look a lot like me.
Saturday, we have a bout against Red Stick Roller Derby. The thought makes me nervous in ways that playing against Greenville, a relative unknown to me, did not. Greenville handed us our asses in ways I'm pretty sure that Red Stick will not. But still, there's a lingering memory associated with Baton Rouge, one that I know my teammates don't share. They were never in that position to have it in the first place.
C'mon, Mary, that was right in front of your face! You're not gonna call that?! What the hell is wrong with you?
I remember wincing, maybe visibly. FFE, Red Stick's coach (whose full name is perhaps best not spelled out for impressionable eyes), had been on my case for this entire bout.
By half-time, my eyes were brimming with tears. Back in the ref room, I bitched bitterly about how disrespectful he was, and how I couldn't concentrate with him riding my ass every time I did (or didn't) make a call.
Come to think of it, I'm not actually sure I made any calls in that game. I'm not sure that I raised that whistle to my lips even once to call a skater off, or even to call off a jam.
The first time I ever reffed a bout was one of the worst experiences of my derby career. It certainly wasn't as bad as the second bout I ever reffed, but that's another story for another time. I hadn't transitioned from rollergirl to ref that long ago, and I knew without a doubt that I was not ready to ref a bout. I kept telling myself that.
I'm pretty sure my lack of confidence showed. For a ref, that's a deadly disability, and rollergirls will prey on it. I didn't understand the interplay between teams and referees, the way that during a game, rollergirls will not only cuss you out but curse your entire family line, and then be totally fine at the after party. It takes a while for refs to get to the point where those insults roll off their shoulders. Some refs never get there. I imagine that plenty quit under the strain of that load.
When I think about Red Stick Roller Derby, that's what I remember. Being absolutely terrified of skating as a ref, but being forced to do it because (surprise!) they hadn't brought any refs with them, and hadn't thought fit to tell us until they set foot in the Skate Center. I'm at least Facebook friends with many of their skaters now. Meeting them face to face, I understand now that they're not the ten foot ogres they seemed when I reffed that bout.
But, I know that this weekend will be no walk in the park. Red Stick is a WFTDA Apprentice League now. They've been trained by some of the smartest and best in the sport.
***
Thirty-five minutes after practice, and I'm not sure what to make of what just happened to me.
When practice started, I felt short of breath. I figured that had a lot to do with me, you know, missing about a week of skating due to tornadoes or the mass of papers sprawled all over my office floor, one or the other. No big deal, right?
Uh, wrong.
During our warmup (our damn warmup, for gods' sakes), I sat down, panting for breath. During our second drill, I practically collapsed on the sidelines. My breath sounded like a noisy hacksaw, I was dizzy, my knees were weak, and a steady tattoo of I can't, I can't, I can't was pounding against my forehead.
That same summer, the one I described above, the one of that disastrous Red Stick bout (and my second disastrous bout), I started having panic attacks.
They were frequent. My thoughts raced, one after the other, taunting me because no matter how hard I focused on calming them, they wouldn't slow down. My hands trembled, my heart pounded, my breaths were shallow and quick. I felt like I was dying. The way the terror rose up in my throat and exploded into my brain was like nothing I had ever known before.
I couldn't do anything. Watching TV made me have panic attacks. Reading made me have panic attacks. Playing World of Warcraft (which was one of my only outlets that long summer) made me have panic attacks. It was literally impossible some days for me to get out of bed. I couldn't sleep, but being awake was torture.
More than ten times a day, I'd feel them coming on, and my body would start to tremble. Endless fear, endless overreaction to things that shouldn't have mattered. I couldn't make them not matter.
When I skated, I'd forget about those things for as long as I was at the rink. Reffing isn't for me, I know that now, but without it, I don't know that I would have left the house that summer. In a very real way, roller derby (and BCR) held me together at a time when all the seams were popping apart and nothing made sense.
That anxiety was crippling, and I doubt I will ever forget what it felt like. It reared its ugly head inside my chest tonight. It leapt up from what I thought was certain death like some perverse black phoenix and said hey jackass, remember me?
It's like some fated movie showdown between good and evil, only I'm not really sure I'm either one of those things, but just me, my surname being entirely appropriate for someone who's somewhere in between most things, content to be neither this nor that, but to exist unlabeled and unquantified.
One drill I sat out because it was a race. I knew my heartrate would get up again, and I didn't trust myself not to freak out. But halfway through it, when it was my scrimmage team's turn to go do burpees while the other team sprinted back and forth, I just said the hell with it and went and did burpees with my team.
It was like flipping a breaker into the off position. Once the current quit flowing into those neurons at breakneck speed, I just skated. I skated and I hit people and yeah, I definitely nailed some people in the wrong places, and yeah I definitely didn't always pay attention when I should have, but it was about more than that for me tonight.
Panic Disorder (if that's what I even have - maybe it's just what they call "Generalized Anxiety Disorder," which never seemed like a very helpful label to me) isn't something that just goes away. You can treat it, but it's more along the lines of managing than it is disappearing it completely.
I knew someday I'd have to face it again. It's ironic that it's rearing its ugly head right before our bout with Red Stick, the very bout at which I started to discover that something inside of me was going very wrong.
I take a low dose anti-depressant every day, and I have for almost two years now. If things get bad, I have a mild anti-anxiety pill that I can take to stave off the panic attacks. Usually, I only take one a day, with my anti-depressant, but either way, I'm tethered to those little orange bottles because sometimes even with them, I don't manage the condition well.
One of my greatest fears once that summer was over and I'd finally gotten some relief from it all was that it would come back one day. It's not realistic for me to expect to never have issues with anxiety again, or even to expect that I'll never have a panic attack again. Tonight was a jolt that reminded me of that fact.
There's one thing I've learned since 2009, though, and much, if not most, of the lesson came to me from starting to skate derby, which I didn't even have the courage to pursue until long after my knee had healed.
It's perhaps best phrased with the tag line from Treme: "Won't bow, don't know how."
If there's anything that I know about myself, it's that I'm a resilient person. I've been through far too much bullshit (there's really no other way to phrase it) than is worth recounting in this blog, but I'm still here, "bloody but unbowed," as it were.
I've been apprehensive about playing Red Stick ever since I saw our season schedule way back in December. Maybe, though, it wasn't Red Stick that I was anxious about. I had a sneaking suspicion, and after tonight, it's becoming a certainty: the monster in the closet may actually look a lot like me.
Wednesday, March 23, 2011
Derby Stories, Part I: The Honeymoon Is Over
Does this girl even play roller derby? some of you may be asking. Does she even know how it can destroy your life? How it can bring out the worst in people?
I do. I've seen a lot of those things firsthand. In myself. In others - opponents, yes, but also teammates, derby wives. Vixen once said that she was selling her soul for roller derby. The remark was intended to be funny, but sometimes, it's not. Or maybe it's funny in the way things are funny because they're true. Maybe I don't write about it that often, but the truth is that for much of last year, I didn't just see the dark side of derby, I lived it.
On August 28 of last year, I played my last bout with BnB. We walked into the Jackson Convention Center right on time. I had played in a mixed scrimmage there last April, so I knew all about the hard hitters, the fast, teeny jammers, and the slick concrete floor.
Unequivocally, I also knew we were screwed.
Tuesday, five days before the bout, three skaters had pulled Ember aside to "talk to her." Predictably, it turned into a screaming match. I always get chosen to moderate bullshit like that. People tell me I'm even-tempered. But even I lost my cool when one of the skaters started shrieking at me because I asked her not to interrupt Ember's explanation. While I tried to listen to their grievances, they accused my derby wife of being a racist, of plagiarizing our logo, of shorting the team on money for the Jackson trip, of attempting to deliberately injure them on the track.
They made their stance very clear: either Ember didn't skate Saturday, or they didn't skate Saturday. Ember had a history of making questionable decisions. I guess I should have see it coming. She refused to back down. Zelda, Fiend Club and Delirium refused to skate, even after I spent the entire week trying to convince them to just finish out the season and not screw over the rest of us because they were pissed at Ember.
It had been a bloody terrible week.
But we couldn't back out. Booking a convention center doesn't come cheap, and we would have owed Magnolia a LOT of money for canceling. We had paid four subs from other teams to fill our roster. We were ten skaters at our strongest, seven when those three quit. BnB had never skated a single bout without the extensive use of subs.
MRV's contract had specified that we were to bring no sub jammers to the bout. Ember chose our subs selectively. Only BIG blockers. If they wouldn't let us have sub jammers when we were woefully short on jammers, then we would stack the deck with huge subs who could lay a jammer out by looking at her. We must have turned down three people or more just because they didn't fit Ember's size requirement for the subs.
Midnight was a nervous wreck. On the drive down, I had joked with Midnight that we had decided to go to New Orleans instead of come to the bout. She believed me. I knew she was nervous, and I knew I was being one of those mean girls to mess with her. Maybe part of me was taking out my frustration on someone who didn't deserve it. That was, after all, a grand BnB tradition.
Some of the others seemed unaffected, mostly because they had no idea what had happened at practice Tuesday. They had no idea why three skaters were mad enough to leave the team. They were here to play derby. I wished fervently that I could trade places and climb in their heads and erase the last week of wasted effort. A cartoonish black thunderstorm surged over my brow, soaking me with very stereotypical misery.
When the first whistle blew, we fell apart. It was a long, long five minutes before we managed to score. Maybe it was longer. It's hard to tell time in moments like this, when seconds of failure stretch into forever. Everyone watched us flounder, dying fish on the sand.
A little more than halfway into the first half, I was playing pivot, at the front of the pack as usual. Our back blockers let Reeta slip through like water through a sieve, and I was the last person who could do a damn thing about it. I knew what I had to do. I dug in and sprinted as she came for the front of the pack. I was on a collision course, going to chase her down and block her to the ground, make the save.
I turned my ankle on that ice-like concrete floor. Hard. As the pain shot through my shin, all I could think about was that I'd let Reeta get away.
I suck at being a hero.
I sat down. I took my skate off. I quietly asked for my derby wife to get me an ice pack for my ankle. Nobody even knew that I was injured until halftime.
I was captain for that bout, as I always was. Ember was co-captain, as she always was. In the locker room, one of the subs was talking over how to redo the lineups with Ember. Ember was ignoring me, not even consulting me on the subject. The sub turned to me and emphasized how terribly she thought I'd played in the first half and what a useless pivot I was. She turned to my derby wife and said that I didn't need to play pivot anymore, and Ember agreed with her. The sub turned back to me and emphasized in her snottiest voice that I was only to concentrate on blocking in the second half.
My stomach twisted harder than my ankle ever could have. My eyes stung. Anger flooded me first and, hands shaking, I skated off to the bathroom. I found Midnight and Vixen in there and I sobbed most of my facepaint off.
It wasn't the first time Ember had made me cry. She was extremely competitive and hated it any time I did something better than her. She was always emphasizing petty things. 'Your kneepads are too tight' meant 'don't you think you're too fat to wear a Size L?' 'I predicted everything you planned to do during the scrimmage tonight' meant 'you're a terrible player without me to back you up.'
Tiny things, raindrops in the ocean, little drops of venom that gradually ate away at my self esteem as a skater.
But nothing Ember said had ever hurt more than what she said during halftime.
I skated only two jams in the second half. I'd love to say it was because of my ankle. But it wasn't. The sub took over running the bench - MY bench - and she refused to put me in. In fact, she refused to put any of us in.
We were losing, so she only put in herself and the other subs. Three jams or more we skated with not a single BnB player in that pack. More than once, I saw Midnight forced to continue skating when she was obviously breathing too hard to function in a pack, much less as a jammer.
I wish I could say I noticed what else happened in the second half. My teammates proved things to themselves while I sat on that bench. I felt like I'd had my head wrapped in cotton, insulated from everything that was going on around me. Numb. Of course we lost. I faked smiles in the after-bout picture, threw all my things in a bag, and shoved everything into the trunk. Many of my teammates were proud of their performances. I wanted to go home.
On the way to the after-party, I broke down in front of my long-suffering husband, my unmoved derby wife, and her smug jackass husband. I couldn't stop my voice from shaking or tears from streaming down my face. Ember told me it was my fault someone else took over the bench. That I wasn't assertive enough. That I should have said something. She told me the only reason she didn't want me to play the second half of the bout was because I was hurt.
I knew a lie when I heard one.
The hell with all the work I'd done to help her set up lineups (which I was not allowed to do on my own in spite of being team captain). The hell with how much work I had put into begging girls not to leave us skating short.
My feelings didn't matter to her then. They mattered to her now for one reason only: she couldn't afford to lose the only person who had supported her the past few months.
If nothing else, Ember had read the writing on the wall. Three skaters had quit the team. That weekend, they went to Atlanta with one of our former fresh meat and decided they were going to start their own derby team. By the time we got back from Jackson, they had a concept for their team, if not a name. In the ensuing weeks, they started recruiting our skaters. If Ember didn't have me, who would she have?
I pulled it together at the after-party. Maybe I just didn't think anyone else needed to see the stress I was under. I was, as many people told me, the glue that held the team together. If it had looked like the glue was failing, everyone would have panicked.
We were staying in a really nice hotel. When we got back, Ember broke out a bottle of rum she'd brought with her. It was the one time I'd ever really seen her get rowdy when she was drunk.
The guys decided they wanted to get some beer. While they were gone, Ember got into a wrestling match with her derby little sister. I'm not that kind of partier. While the two of them shrieked and slapped each other, rolling around on the floor, I sat in one of the hotel chairs and watched.
"Helley, help me!" her little sister shrieked, eyes wide as she tried to escape from Ember's grasp.
That was when Ember crossed the line. I don't remember the words she used, but they meant that I was too attracted to her to stop her from wrestling around on the floor with another woman.
Even after sharing that rum, I couldn't suppress the anger. White, ugly, hard anger that welled up after how she'd treated me at the bout. It was insulting, the way she said it. Helley will let me do anything. She's blindly devoted. She thinks I'm hot.
For the record, I find it hard to be attracted to people who are that mean-spirited. People who prey on the vulnerabilities of others to hide their own.
They broke the bed after that. Her little sister was hanging on to the headboard and Ember jerked her away from it. They pulled it off the wall.
"Oh, don't worry about that," Ember said blithely, "BD will pay for it."
It really didn't matter to me why she thought that was the case. For one of the first times, I was able to let my anger come through clearly. I wanted to hit her for saying it. I wanted to yell at her until my voice was raw.
All night, I listened to her whine and vomit. She was hungover and bitchy in the morning, just like she was always hungover and bitchy whenever she drank. I never understood why she drank like she did when she knew she got bad hangovers. But you can't always protect people from themselves. Sometimes people need to be allowed to self-destruct until they learn something.
And me? I wrapped myself around that core of anger, closing down on it like an oyster. It lay there like an irritant, a constant voice murmuring 'too much, too much, too much.' Until one day not long afterwards, it turned into a roar.
Ember would discover too late that, in the words of one of my favorite poets, "there is some shit I will not eat."
-----
*This post is written in its literary style with apologies to 9 Lb. Hammer, who has pretty much cornered the market on BCR writing.
I do. I've seen a lot of those things firsthand. In myself. In others - opponents, yes, but also teammates, derby wives. Vixen once said that she was selling her soul for roller derby. The remark was intended to be funny, but sometimes, it's not. Or maybe it's funny in the way things are funny because they're true. Maybe I don't write about it that often, but the truth is that for much of last year, I didn't just see the dark side of derby, I lived it.
On August 28 of last year, I played my last bout with BnB. We walked into the Jackson Convention Center right on time. I had played in a mixed scrimmage there last April, so I knew all about the hard hitters, the fast, teeny jammers, and the slick concrete floor.
Unequivocally, I also knew we were screwed.
Tuesday, five days before the bout, three skaters had pulled Ember aside to "talk to her." Predictably, it turned into a screaming match. I always get chosen to moderate bullshit like that. People tell me I'm even-tempered. But even I lost my cool when one of the skaters started shrieking at me because I asked her not to interrupt Ember's explanation. While I tried to listen to their grievances, they accused my derby wife of being a racist, of plagiarizing our logo, of shorting the team on money for the Jackson trip, of attempting to deliberately injure them on the track.
They made their stance very clear: either Ember didn't skate Saturday, or they didn't skate Saturday. Ember had a history of making questionable decisions. I guess I should have see it coming. She refused to back down. Zelda, Fiend Club and Delirium refused to skate, even after I spent the entire week trying to convince them to just finish out the season and not screw over the rest of us because they were pissed at Ember.
It had been a bloody terrible week.
But we couldn't back out. Booking a convention center doesn't come cheap, and we would have owed Magnolia a LOT of money for canceling. We had paid four subs from other teams to fill our roster. We were ten skaters at our strongest, seven when those three quit. BnB had never skated a single bout without the extensive use of subs.
MRV's contract had specified that we were to bring no sub jammers to the bout. Ember chose our subs selectively. Only BIG blockers. If they wouldn't let us have sub jammers when we were woefully short on jammers, then we would stack the deck with huge subs who could lay a jammer out by looking at her. We must have turned down three people or more just because they didn't fit Ember's size requirement for the subs.
Midnight was a nervous wreck. On the drive down, I had joked with Midnight that we had decided to go to New Orleans instead of come to the bout. She believed me. I knew she was nervous, and I knew I was being one of those mean girls to mess with her. Maybe part of me was taking out my frustration on someone who didn't deserve it. That was, after all, a grand BnB tradition.
Some of the others seemed unaffected, mostly because they had no idea what had happened at practice Tuesday. They had no idea why three skaters were mad enough to leave the team. They were here to play derby. I wished fervently that I could trade places and climb in their heads and erase the last week of wasted effort. A cartoonish black thunderstorm surged over my brow, soaking me with very stereotypical misery.
When the first whistle blew, we fell apart. It was a long, long five minutes before we managed to score. Maybe it was longer. It's hard to tell time in moments like this, when seconds of failure stretch into forever. Everyone watched us flounder, dying fish on the sand.
A little more than halfway into the first half, I was playing pivot, at the front of the pack as usual. Our back blockers let Reeta slip through like water through a sieve, and I was the last person who could do a damn thing about it. I knew what I had to do. I dug in and sprinted as she came for the front of the pack. I was on a collision course, going to chase her down and block her to the ground, make the save.
I turned my ankle on that ice-like concrete floor. Hard. As the pain shot through my shin, all I could think about was that I'd let Reeta get away.
I suck at being a hero.
I sat down. I took my skate off. I quietly asked for my derby wife to get me an ice pack for my ankle. Nobody even knew that I was injured until halftime.
I was captain for that bout, as I always was. Ember was co-captain, as she always was. In the locker room, one of the subs was talking over how to redo the lineups with Ember. Ember was ignoring me, not even consulting me on the subject. The sub turned to me and emphasized how terribly she thought I'd played in the first half and what a useless pivot I was. She turned to my derby wife and said that I didn't need to play pivot anymore, and Ember agreed with her. The sub turned back to me and emphasized in her snottiest voice that I was only to concentrate on blocking in the second half.
My stomach twisted harder than my ankle ever could have. My eyes stung. Anger flooded me first and, hands shaking, I skated off to the bathroom. I found Midnight and Vixen in there and I sobbed most of my facepaint off.
It wasn't the first time Ember had made me cry. She was extremely competitive and hated it any time I did something better than her. She was always emphasizing petty things. 'Your kneepads are too tight' meant 'don't you think you're too fat to wear a Size L?' 'I predicted everything you planned to do during the scrimmage tonight' meant 'you're a terrible player without me to back you up.'
Tiny things, raindrops in the ocean, little drops of venom that gradually ate away at my self esteem as a skater.
But nothing Ember said had ever hurt more than what she said during halftime.
I skated only two jams in the second half. I'd love to say it was because of my ankle. But it wasn't. The sub took over running the bench - MY bench - and she refused to put me in. In fact, she refused to put any of us in.
We were losing, so she only put in herself and the other subs. Three jams or more we skated with not a single BnB player in that pack. More than once, I saw Midnight forced to continue skating when she was obviously breathing too hard to function in a pack, much less as a jammer.
I wish I could say I noticed what else happened in the second half. My teammates proved things to themselves while I sat on that bench. I felt like I'd had my head wrapped in cotton, insulated from everything that was going on around me. Numb. Of course we lost. I faked smiles in the after-bout picture, threw all my things in a bag, and shoved everything into the trunk. Many of my teammates were proud of their performances. I wanted to go home.
On the way to the after-party, I broke down in front of my long-suffering husband, my unmoved derby wife, and her smug jackass husband. I couldn't stop my voice from shaking or tears from streaming down my face. Ember told me it was my fault someone else took over the bench. That I wasn't assertive enough. That I should have said something. She told me the only reason she didn't want me to play the second half of the bout was because I was hurt.
I knew a lie when I heard one.
The hell with all the work I'd done to help her set up lineups (which I was not allowed to do on my own in spite of being team captain). The hell with how much work I had put into begging girls not to leave us skating short.
My feelings didn't matter to her then. They mattered to her now for one reason only: she couldn't afford to lose the only person who had supported her the past few months.
If nothing else, Ember had read the writing on the wall. Three skaters had quit the team. That weekend, they went to Atlanta with one of our former fresh meat and decided they were going to start their own derby team. By the time we got back from Jackson, they had a concept for their team, if not a name. In the ensuing weeks, they started recruiting our skaters. If Ember didn't have me, who would she have?
I pulled it together at the after-party. Maybe I just didn't think anyone else needed to see the stress I was under. I was, as many people told me, the glue that held the team together. If it had looked like the glue was failing, everyone would have panicked.
We were staying in a really nice hotel. When we got back, Ember broke out a bottle of rum she'd brought with her. It was the one time I'd ever really seen her get rowdy when she was drunk.
The guys decided they wanted to get some beer. While they were gone, Ember got into a wrestling match with her derby little sister. I'm not that kind of partier. While the two of them shrieked and slapped each other, rolling around on the floor, I sat in one of the hotel chairs and watched.
"Helley, help me!" her little sister shrieked, eyes wide as she tried to escape from Ember's grasp.
That was when Ember crossed the line. I don't remember the words she used, but they meant that I was too attracted to her to stop her from wrestling around on the floor with another woman.
Even after sharing that rum, I couldn't suppress the anger. White, ugly, hard anger that welled up after how she'd treated me at the bout. It was insulting, the way she said it. Helley will let me do anything. She's blindly devoted. She thinks I'm hot.
For the record, I find it hard to be attracted to people who are that mean-spirited. People who prey on the vulnerabilities of others to hide their own.
They broke the bed after that. Her little sister was hanging on to the headboard and Ember jerked her away from it. They pulled it off the wall.
"Oh, don't worry about that," Ember said blithely, "BD will pay for it."
It really didn't matter to me why she thought that was the case. For one of the first times, I was able to let my anger come through clearly. I wanted to hit her for saying it. I wanted to yell at her until my voice was raw.
All night, I listened to her whine and vomit. She was hungover and bitchy in the morning, just like she was always hungover and bitchy whenever she drank. I never understood why she drank like she did when she knew she got bad hangovers. But you can't always protect people from themselves. Sometimes people need to be allowed to self-destruct until they learn something.
And me? I wrapped myself around that core of anger, closing down on it like an oyster. It lay there like an irritant, a constant voice murmuring 'too much, too much, too much.' Until one day not long afterwards, it turned into a roar.
Ember would discover too late that, in the words of one of my favorite poets, "there is some shit I will not eat."
-----
*This post is written in its literary style with apologies to 9 Lb. Hammer, who has pretty much cornered the market on BCR writing.
Monday, November 22, 2010
Frustration Based Training
First, an injury update: I'm extremely annoyed by these damnable shin splints. Dear reader, if you've never had shin splints before, they are one of the most annoying painful injuries there is - sharp shooting pains up the front of your lower leg, or, in this case, up the inside of my lower leg. I was hoping that taking some time off would really help a good deal, and it has. The pain is, at least, not excruciating now. But it's definitely still there.
I've found myself beating my head up against very typical frustration. I get annoyed at my body very easily when it won't do what I want it to do. In this case, it won't let me do the hard training that I need to do to start getting ready for the next season. I had to skip Sunday's skate practice, which not only screws up my attendance for the month, but deprives me of an opportunity to skate, which is just... depressing, frankly. I didn't make any off-skates practices this week, and even though I tried, I would have been an idiot to try to force my shins through hard plyometrics on concrete floor.
I'm trying in the best ways I know how to distract myself from sitting here screeching in my head "WHY WON'T THEY JUST HEAL?!" I've alternately been very down in the dumps about it, and very motivated to train through it. In order to turn off the harpy that wants to just ignore the injury and keep pushing it until I get a stress fracture, I've forced myself to be super-organized about how I'm training while I'm not skating.
Cardio has been the most difficult part. The best way for me to get cardio is by skating, but I don't want to push that right now- what if I skate and make the shin splints worse? That will set me back. I can't run for the same reason- too high impact, even worse for the injury than skating. I can ride our communal bike, which is an acceptable substitute, I suppose. At least it's on wheels. But I've frankly not enjoyed it near as much as I enjoyed biking as a kid. My preferred method of cardio would be swimming, but I've been too down in the dumps to go sign up for a membership at the local pool. I suppose I need to get over that, since it's pretty much the perfect cardio substitute until my shins get better: low impact, something I love to do, and great exercise.
I've divided dry land training into three components, attempting for the life of me to use my obsessive Capricorn ordering skills to produce something productive out of something very frustrating, and frankly depressing.
1) PT/Shin Strengthening. Though, as noted, I took a break on Sunday, today, plus last Friday and Saturday, I began a program of shin strengthening meant to help with the weak ankle muscles that cause feet to pronate when you run (or skate). So far, exercises for my shins have consisted of special stretches designed to prepare the area (as many shin splints can be linked to inadequate stretching), plus walking on my toes and heels, plus toe raises in various permutations: leaning against the wall, as preparation to take a step, and toe raises that push the ankle outward and keep the ankle from pronating.
I'm still experiencing shin pain, but I can feel definite muscle resistance and burning (the good kind) when I do the exercises. I notice that when I try to flex my feet upwards, I experience a lot of inflexibility, and suspect this may be part of the problem with my running gait- maybe my skating stride too. I have no complaints about the program I've adopted to ease the injury and strengthen the area- after all, I haven't even been at it a week yet. I'm also taking Aleve regularly, and icing my shins (not as often as I should). In a week, I hope to update a bit more with some details as to how the program of treatment is working.
2) Core Training. If I were to describe my approach to this injury, it might be "Killing Myself with Core Training." However, considering how important core strength is for derby, I figure if I can't work on things like explosive power, agility, and skating endurance, I can amp up my core strength for when I'm able to return to skating. Again, I took a break on Sunday, but otherwise have been core training Friday, Saturday, and today. A brief list:
25 crunches x6 different types (straight, to each side, obliques on each side, and hip lifts); straight leg lifts; side leg lifts; Rover's revenge (both quick and isometric); step-downs; and different styles of leg lifts, like scissors, flutter kicks, hundreds and just straight leg lifts for anywhere from 30-45 seconds. I've also thrown in pushups, planks (basic and side) and supermans for good measure.
I've always known that my core strength wasn't as good as it needed to be, so in retrospect, it's not such a dumb idea to do this instead of exercises that always focus on my leg strength. My legs are pretty strong- but the core above them sometimes not so much.
I'd love to say I see results, but I'm not quite sure I do. My abs feel about like they usually do- that is, I can feel some strength and definition, but there's definitely a layer of padding over them. I've lost almost 10 pounds since starting to monitor my calories seriously, but it's hard to notice the difference sometimes, which is a bit discouraging. I don't know how to measure the results of core training, in any case- my guess is that it will best be measured by the difference when I actually skate and have to use my core to hold me in place, in which case I plan to exercise my core fairly relentlessly over this week, and if that gives me results when I'm back to skating, then I'll keep doing so. Crossing my fingers.
3) Resistance Training. I'll be the first to say that I've never been a weight trainer. I signed up for a boot camp when I was in derby with Belles 'n' Bombshells this summer (and ended up giving it up after one week, admittedly), which required weights, and I learned some things about it then- namely that resistance training wasn't as bad as I thought it would be, and that maybe I should give it a chance.
My resistance training so far (today is the second day of it) involves basically circuit training with 5 pound handweights. I'm starting off with small weights for a couple of reasons. First, as I mentioned, I'm a total amateur with weights. Second, because of injuries to my wrists from six years spinning flags in marching band, I've got cubital tunnel syndrome, which makes my wrists weak, and gives me a little difficulty gripping things. I don't want to start off my weight training too heavy and end up dropping something on my toe.
The list goes in a circuit like this: flat chest presses, flat chest flies, shoulder presses, lateral raises, front raises, single arm row, upright row, shrugs, hammer curls, concentration curls, kickbacks, squats and dumbbell lunges. Today, I'm planning on 30 secs. per exercise, and 3 reps through of the circuit.
Again, I don't know what the difference would be. When I first tried these exercises on Saturday, I could definitely tell that my body was unused to weight training, and that many of the muscle groups I was exercising were underdeveloped. I'm planning on continuing to weight train a few days every week, even when I get back to skating, just to keep those muscles developed. A stronger body means a stronger skater.
Overall, I'd love to say that all this exercise has made me feel awesome. In a lot of ways, it does; I'm pretty sure I've mentioned before how singularly AWFUL my discipline has been in the past when it comes to actually keeping a detailed workout plan, and sticking to the things I plan to do. The very idea of off-season endurance training, and improving enough to skate with this wonderful team next season has made that a piece of cake. In that way, I'm impressed with the results: I've been able to keep a dedication to getting fitter and monitoring how I treat my body like never before. And the mental results have been pleasing as well- admittedly, I feel good about myself when I exercise, and I feel good when I clock in under my calorie count for the day, and I feel good when I step on the scale and see that I've lost weight.
One thing I HAVE discovered is that the years of depression and sedentary moping haven't served me well. I can't believe I was able to get through ONE season of roller derby with this poor body conditioning, total lack of strength and endurance. That in itself, I think, speaks to my want to play this sport, and my determination. But although roller derby is deeply psychological, it's also deeply physical. The body WANTS to be well toned and kept to play a sport like this. When you know that the machinery won't fail you, then the philosophy behind that machine has less chance of doing so as well.
I've found myself beating my head up against very typical frustration. I get annoyed at my body very easily when it won't do what I want it to do. In this case, it won't let me do the hard training that I need to do to start getting ready for the next season. I had to skip Sunday's skate practice, which not only screws up my attendance for the month, but deprives me of an opportunity to skate, which is just... depressing, frankly. I didn't make any off-skates practices this week, and even though I tried, I would have been an idiot to try to force my shins through hard plyometrics on concrete floor.
I'm trying in the best ways I know how to distract myself from sitting here screeching in my head "WHY WON'T THEY JUST HEAL?!" I've alternately been very down in the dumps about it, and very motivated to train through it. In order to turn off the harpy that wants to just ignore the injury and keep pushing it until I get a stress fracture, I've forced myself to be super-organized about how I'm training while I'm not skating.
Cardio has been the most difficult part. The best way for me to get cardio is by skating, but I don't want to push that right now- what if I skate and make the shin splints worse? That will set me back. I can't run for the same reason- too high impact, even worse for the injury than skating. I can ride our communal bike, which is an acceptable substitute, I suppose. At least it's on wheels. But I've frankly not enjoyed it near as much as I enjoyed biking as a kid. My preferred method of cardio would be swimming, but I've been too down in the dumps to go sign up for a membership at the local pool. I suppose I need to get over that, since it's pretty much the perfect cardio substitute until my shins get better: low impact, something I love to do, and great exercise.
I've divided dry land training into three components, attempting for the life of me to use my obsessive Capricorn ordering skills to produce something productive out of something very frustrating, and frankly depressing.
1) PT/Shin Strengthening. Though, as noted, I took a break on Sunday, today, plus last Friday and Saturday, I began a program of shin strengthening meant to help with the weak ankle muscles that cause feet to pronate when you run (or skate). So far, exercises for my shins have consisted of special stretches designed to prepare the area (as many shin splints can be linked to inadequate stretching), plus walking on my toes and heels, plus toe raises in various permutations: leaning against the wall, as preparation to take a step, and toe raises that push the ankle outward and keep the ankle from pronating.
I'm still experiencing shin pain, but I can feel definite muscle resistance and burning (the good kind) when I do the exercises. I notice that when I try to flex my feet upwards, I experience a lot of inflexibility, and suspect this may be part of the problem with my running gait- maybe my skating stride too. I have no complaints about the program I've adopted to ease the injury and strengthen the area- after all, I haven't even been at it a week yet. I'm also taking Aleve regularly, and icing my shins (not as often as I should). In a week, I hope to update a bit more with some details as to how the program of treatment is working.
2) Core Training. If I were to describe my approach to this injury, it might be "Killing Myself with Core Training." However, considering how important core strength is for derby, I figure if I can't work on things like explosive power, agility, and skating endurance, I can amp up my core strength for when I'm able to return to skating. Again, I took a break on Sunday, but otherwise have been core training Friday, Saturday, and today. A brief list:
25 crunches x6 different types (straight, to each side, obliques on each side, and hip lifts); straight leg lifts; side leg lifts; Rover's revenge (both quick and isometric); step-downs; and different styles of leg lifts, like scissors, flutter kicks, hundreds and just straight leg lifts for anywhere from 30-45 seconds. I've also thrown in pushups, planks (basic and side) and supermans for good measure.
I've always known that my core strength wasn't as good as it needed to be, so in retrospect, it's not such a dumb idea to do this instead of exercises that always focus on my leg strength. My legs are pretty strong- but the core above them sometimes not so much.
I'd love to say I see results, but I'm not quite sure I do. My abs feel about like they usually do- that is, I can feel some strength and definition, but there's definitely a layer of padding over them. I've lost almost 10 pounds since starting to monitor my calories seriously, but it's hard to notice the difference sometimes, which is a bit discouraging. I don't know how to measure the results of core training, in any case- my guess is that it will best be measured by the difference when I actually skate and have to use my core to hold me in place, in which case I plan to exercise my core fairly relentlessly over this week, and if that gives me results when I'm back to skating, then I'll keep doing so. Crossing my fingers.
3) Resistance Training. I'll be the first to say that I've never been a weight trainer. I signed up for a boot camp when I was in derby with Belles 'n' Bombshells this summer (and ended up giving it up after one week, admittedly), which required weights, and I learned some things about it then- namely that resistance training wasn't as bad as I thought it would be, and that maybe I should give it a chance.
My resistance training so far (today is the second day of it) involves basically circuit training with 5 pound handweights. I'm starting off with small weights for a couple of reasons. First, as I mentioned, I'm a total amateur with weights. Second, because of injuries to my wrists from six years spinning flags in marching band, I've got cubital tunnel syndrome, which makes my wrists weak, and gives me a little difficulty gripping things. I don't want to start off my weight training too heavy and end up dropping something on my toe.
The list goes in a circuit like this: flat chest presses, flat chest flies, shoulder presses, lateral raises, front raises, single arm row, upright row, shrugs, hammer curls, concentration curls, kickbacks, squats and dumbbell lunges. Today, I'm planning on 30 secs. per exercise, and 3 reps through of the circuit.
Again, I don't know what the difference would be. When I first tried these exercises on Saturday, I could definitely tell that my body was unused to weight training, and that many of the muscle groups I was exercising were underdeveloped. I'm planning on continuing to weight train a few days every week, even when I get back to skating, just to keep those muscles developed. A stronger body means a stronger skater.
Overall, I'd love to say that all this exercise has made me feel awesome. In a lot of ways, it does; I'm pretty sure I've mentioned before how singularly AWFUL my discipline has been in the past when it comes to actually keeping a detailed workout plan, and sticking to the things I plan to do. The very idea of off-season endurance training, and improving enough to skate with this wonderful team next season has made that a piece of cake. In that way, I'm impressed with the results: I've been able to keep a dedication to getting fitter and monitoring how I treat my body like never before. And the mental results have been pleasing as well- admittedly, I feel good about myself when I exercise, and I feel good when I clock in under my calorie count for the day, and I feel good when I step on the scale and see that I've lost weight.
One thing I HAVE discovered is that the years of depression and sedentary moping haven't served me well. I can't believe I was able to get through ONE season of roller derby with this poor body conditioning, total lack of strength and endurance. That in itself, I think, speaks to my want to play this sport, and my determination. But although roller derby is deeply psychological, it's also deeply physical. The body WANTS to be well toned and kept to play a sport like this. When you know that the machinery won't fail you, then the philosophy behind that machine has less chance of doing so as well.
Friday, November 19, 2010
Setbacks, or AUUUUGH.
I've been researching, and recruiting the husband to research, this weird pain I've had on the inside of my legs since the first time I did off-skates practice a couple of weeks ago. I was banking on it being a muscle issue, something that I could easily fix with better stretching and/or better lacing and support in my shoes and skates.
It's something like that, after a manner of speaking. However, it's also more annoying than I could have imagined, and the description of my symptoms fits it to a T - posterior shin splints.
Collective groan, please.
I've had shin splints before. The reason I didn't suspect them again was because the first time I had them, I had the version that runs down the front of your legs, or anterior shin splints. They were pretty easy to recognize, because they were actually on the part of the leg that we normally think of as the shin... with the ones I have now, I was taken by surprise.
I was hoping that this couldn't possibly be what was going on, but reading the causes, I don't have a whole lot of room for doubt. One of the first was increasing your workout load suddenly rather than gradually. I first started feeling this pain after I went to my first off-skates practice. We did a lot of running, plyo and aerobics, all things that my body wasn't used to at the time, and now, as it turns out, changing your workout program too quickly can cause shin splints. Also included in the causes, low arches (which I have), too little stretching (which is almost always the case for me), and running on concrete or another unforgiving surface (the floor of the Coliseum is very definitely bare concrete).
Included in the symptoms? Pain on the inside of the lower leg- check. Pain that seems bad at the beginning of a workout, but relents after a warmup period- check. Pain that makes it difficult for you to straighten your muscles out and walk normally a few days after working out- check. What I was mistaking for delayed onset muscle soreness was most definitely shin splints.
The number one recommendation for fixing the problem is to stop physical activity and rest the injury. Thinking that what I had was DOMS, which you're supposed to work through, I've continued to do my typical workouts, and, of course, the symptoms haven't gone away. Continuing to exercise on shin splints can apparently produce stress fractures in the tibia, which scares me- not because it likely hurts, but because it will weaken some of the most important structures I have for skating.
What I'm basically going to have to do is change the way I train for a little while, until the injury can heal and I can work on strengthening the muscles and correcting the overpronation in my feet. I suppose, since it's Thanksgiving week coming up, that it's a good time to do so.
Sunday, I plan to attend our last skating practice until after the Thanksgiving break. Yesterday's off-skates was canceled due to a robotics competition up at the Coliseum that is supposedly going on all weekend. I presume that it will be canceled this evening as well.
Tonight, I'd planned to do some more aggressive plyometrics to work on agility, but until my shins are healed, I don't think high impact jumps are a good idea. This afternoon, I'm going to research core exercises and concentrate on low-impact, core strengthening exercises like crunches, leg lifts, lunges, and squats. For the next few days, I plan to work mostly on strength rather than endurance training, as well as taking the time to work on rehabilitation exercises for shin splints that focus on properly stretching out the muscles around the area, and correcting problems like overpronation of the foot by strengthening the muscles involved.
Not good news, especially not since I'd gotten so excited about training hard over the off season. But I suppose it was going to be hard to continue to do things like running and high-impact plyometrics over Thanksgiving week anyway. Better that I use this week for something.
In case you can't tell from the tone, I'm a little bit depressed over this setback. But I'm hoping that with research and planning, I'll be able to turn that around and do something useful while I'm not running and jumping and pounding the pavement.
It's something like that, after a manner of speaking. However, it's also more annoying than I could have imagined, and the description of my symptoms fits it to a T - posterior shin splints.
Collective groan, please.
I've had shin splints before. The reason I didn't suspect them again was because the first time I had them, I had the version that runs down the front of your legs, or anterior shin splints. They were pretty easy to recognize, because they were actually on the part of the leg that we normally think of as the shin... with the ones I have now, I was taken by surprise.
I was hoping that this couldn't possibly be what was going on, but reading the causes, I don't have a whole lot of room for doubt. One of the first was increasing your workout load suddenly rather than gradually. I first started feeling this pain after I went to my first off-skates practice. We did a lot of running, plyo and aerobics, all things that my body wasn't used to at the time, and now, as it turns out, changing your workout program too quickly can cause shin splints. Also included in the causes, low arches (which I have), too little stretching (which is almost always the case for me), and running on concrete or another unforgiving surface (the floor of the Coliseum is very definitely bare concrete).
Included in the symptoms? Pain on the inside of the lower leg- check. Pain that seems bad at the beginning of a workout, but relents after a warmup period- check. Pain that makes it difficult for you to straighten your muscles out and walk normally a few days after working out- check. What I was mistaking for delayed onset muscle soreness was most definitely shin splints.
The number one recommendation for fixing the problem is to stop physical activity and rest the injury. Thinking that what I had was DOMS, which you're supposed to work through, I've continued to do my typical workouts, and, of course, the symptoms haven't gone away. Continuing to exercise on shin splints can apparently produce stress fractures in the tibia, which scares me- not because it likely hurts, but because it will weaken some of the most important structures I have for skating.
What I'm basically going to have to do is change the way I train for a little while, until the injury can heal and I can work on strengthening the muscles and correcting the overpronation in my feet. I suppose, since it's Thanksgiving week coming up, that it's a good time to do so.
Sunday, I plan to attend our last skating practice until after the Thanksgiving break. Yesterday's off-skates was canceled due to a robotics competition up at the Coliseum that is supposedly going on all weekend. I presume that it will be canceled this evening as well.
Tonight, I'd planned to do some more aggressive plyometrics to work on agility, but until my shins are healed, I don't think high impact jumps are a good idea. This afternoon, I'm going to research core exercises and concentrate on low-impact, core strengthening exercises like crunches, leg lifts, lunges, and squats. For the next few days, I plan to work mostly on strength rather than endurance training, as well as taking the time to work on rehabilitation exercises for shin splints that focus on properly stretching out the muscles around the area, and correcting problems like overpronation of the foot by strengthening the muscles involved.
Not good news, especially not since I'd gotten so excited about training hard over the off season. But I suppose it was going to be hard to continue to do things like running and high-impact plyometrics over Thanksgiving week anyway. Better that I use this week for something.
In case you can't tell from the tone, I'm a little bit depressed over this setback. But I'm hoping that with research and planning, I'll be able to turn that around and do something useful while I'm not running and jumping and pounding the pavement.
Monday, April 5, 2010
Hello, World.
I'm Mary Helley. You won't know that name- I skate for a team that has just started on its first season. That team being in Alabama, you might guess that we don't have quite the population to pull from that teams in other, bigger states and other, bigger cities might have.
However small we might be, though, Belles 'N' Bombshells is a family. Me being one of those "women who don't generally get along with other women" types, I wasn't expecting to roll up into Montgomery and find a bunch of amazing sisters, people who have extended my concept of what a roller derby team is, and moreover, what a friend is.
I skated my first bout this past weekend- well, that's actually something of a misnomer. I skated my first bout as a skater this past weekend. From January to November of 2009, I nursed a knee injury and skated as a referee for my first league, Auburn's Burn City Rollers. I realized a few important things during that time- one, that I loved roller derby too much to quit when I didn't know what was wrong with my knee, like a lot of our other skaters had. Two, though I learned a lot from reffing, it wasn't satisfying in many ways.
Truth was, I needed a team. It was scary for me to make the decision to be a skater. Over the time that I'd been hurt, I'd built up a lot of resistance to the idea. And by that, I don't mean that I didn't want to do it. I wanted it still. But I was scared, first of all. I didn't know what was wrong with my knee, and though it was better by the time I started training with BnB in November, I was still scared that it would give out on me, or that I would injure it worse. The other thing was the more crushing of the two: I didn't believe. I didn't believe that I could do it.
Whatever the impression BCR had meant to convey (and I don't fault them for this), they had made me feel like they didn't believe either. Like nobody but my husband believed. To his credit, he never stopped believing that I could be a skater if I wanted to.
So here I am now- a shade more than a year after I first started reffing for this wonderful sport we call roller derby. Things are different now. I look at the game from a totally different perspective. But there are still things that I have to learn. That's the aim of this blog- to write down those things that I learn. To offer some insight into the mind of a referee-turned-pivot, and hopefully entertain a few fellow derby lifers at the same time.
Slugs 'n' Stitches,
Mary Helley
However small we might be, though, Belles 'N' Bombshells is a family. Me being one of those "women who don't generally get along with other women" types, I wasn't expecting to roll up into Montgomery and find a bunch of amazing sisters, people who have extended my concept of what a roller derby team is, and moreover, what a friend is.
I skated my first bout this past weekend- well, that's actually something of a misnomer. I skated my first bout as a skater this past weekend. From January to November of 2009, I nursed a knee injury and skated as a referee for my first league, Auburn's Burn City Rollers. I realized a few important things during that time- one, that I loved roller derby too much to quit when I didn't know what was wrong with my knee, like a lot of our other skaters had. Two, though I learned a lot from reffing, it wasn't satisfying in many ways.
Truth was, I needed a team. It was scary for me to make the decision to be a skater. Over the time that I'd been hurt, I'd built up a lot of resistance to the idea. And by that, I don't mean that I didn't want to do it. I wanted it still. But I was scared, first of all. I didn't know what was wrong with my knee, and though it was better by the time I started training with BnB in November, I was still scared that it would give out on me, or that I would injure it worse. The other thing was the more crushing of the two: I didn't believe. I didn't believe that I could do it.
Whatever the impression BCR had meant to convey (and I don't fault them for this), they had made me feel like they didn't believe either. Like nobody but my husband believed. To his credit, he never stopped believing that I could be a skater if I wanted to.
So here I am now- a shade more than a year after I first started reffing for this wonderful sport we call roller derby. Things are different now. I look at the game from a totally different perspective. But there are still things that I have to learn. That's the aim of this blog- to write down those things that I learn. To offer some insight into the mind of a referee-turned-pivot, and hopefully entertain a few fellow derby lifers at the same time.
Slugs 'n' Stitches,
Mary Helley
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