I allude to this a bit in my bio, but last October, I decided to try out for my local roller derby. The year before, I tried out for the synchronized skating team. That didn't work out so well, but I couldn't let go of the fascinating idea of being on a team. Roller derby may be on wheels, but it appealed to me in that respect. I gave it my all as fresh meat, which apparently wasn't enough. I took what are called assessments in April, and it was the worst experience of my life. I never want to go through that again. My time in roller derby felt like nothing more than heartache and damaging self esteem, which I'm still trying to recover from.
However, there is one amazing thing derby did for me. It has renewed my love of figure skating so fiercely. I haven't seen this kind of dedication bordering on obsession since high school. Even in college, skating was tough. The drive was long from campus, and finding a class schedule around skating was frustrating. But in high school, I was at the rink almost daily. Of course, I lived a lot closer to the rink then. And had a flexible schedule. But it was all I wanted to do. Eat. Sleep. Skate.
It's ~20 years later from when I took my first lesson. I have adult responsibilities. A job. Bills. A husband. A rink that is 30 mins drive away. I couldn't possibly skate every day. But I'm skating a lot. ~3x a week for an hour with hopes of increasing to maybe 1.5 hours and adding a 4th day. I have recovered the abilities lost being off ice so long with roller derby...and then some.
Eeyore says: Rain clouds. Every silver lining has one. But in this case, the rain cloud that was derby has quite the silver lining. Just keep (ice) skating...
No comments:
Post a Comment