I was pretty happy with the fact that it all came back within the first 15 mins. cross overs, t-stops, plow stops all still doable. i couldn’t wait to start the derby lite training classes on the Thursday.

Thursday rolled around and my body was in for a rude shock. 8 weeks and no exercise to BAM 2 and a half hours of full on skating and manoeuvres. we covered everything we had learnt in the boot camp in one lesson.. madness.. as well as additional baseball slide stop which are pretty fun. As i limped off the floor already sore and covered from head to toe in derby juice (sweat lol) i knew i was already in for a painful few days… i was so right.

The next Thursday my groin was still playing up so i couldn’t do falls but we learnt a new and pretty scary move that i still have a massive amount of work to do on:

the transition : skating forward turn your skates around one at a time so you are facing the other way and stop using your toe stops… eeek. i fail so hard at this but it’s all practise and muscle memory. there was a few variations on this involving jumping but i dared not try them.. not considering the amount of stacks i had already accumulated that night.

so the aim for the moment is to skate casually once a week with the girls (claire and new derby wife bec) and then train on thursday’s in the intermediate class. once I’m a little fitter i will try and fit in another sesh during the week and do some derby recommended workouts which i’ll post here if i have any success with. Also will be attempting to do the 1000 steps weekly as well.

In other news it appears my first choice derby name has been snatched up by an american girl so i have to come up with something different. at the moment i’m tossing around blitzkrieg banshee but i have another few floating around if that doesn’t work.

In my break time i was asked to restyle/update the VRDL wordpress theme which was a bit of fun. I also put my name down for volunteer duties so i will hopefully get to help out at the next bout in march. check the link for more details.

so that’s it for now. the dream is still alive. i think about the sport all the time so i think that’s a pretty good indication that it’s something I’m going to stick with. I’m just waiting for my next paycheck to come in so i can splurge on some new wheels and gaskets.

xo