No one likes change

Something exciting has happened!  Over the summer (and possibly longer) our team's midweek training has been forced to change venues, which also means the days training happens have changed.  Which means I can attend!  Our old Monday Freeskates were always an impossibility for me due to my course, but now we've switched to Wednesdays I'm going to be able to go pretty much every week!  This is especially good news as we are currently in mid-May, the beginning of the holiday/wedding season.  I already have two hen parties and their subsequent weddings in the diary, as well as an 8-day long trip with my course, and a walking holiday followed by a short festival.  While these are all fantastic events involving people I love and want to be there for (and many of them planned since last year) as a new skater I find that it really frustrates me to have to miss any of the Sunday sessions.  Sunday is our main Newbie training day, and my only day on skates each week until now.  Missing one training session can mean I don't skate for a week, or even a fortnight, which is just too long.

Case in point - I missed a week due to a friend visiting, then attended the following week but found our hall had accidentally been double-booked and we had to train off skates.  Next Sunday I'm on rota to help with the kids work at church, so that's another missed session, and the weekend after I'be got a Hen Do to attend.  Without even doing anything out of the ordinary, that's suddenly a month of not skating, not training, not consolidating my new skills.  It doesn't bear thinking about.  However with mid-week skating now possible I will still be able to skate once a week.  And then, once all these events are over, twice!  TWICE A WEEK!  Imagine what a difference that's going to make.  Fantastic!

The flip side of this double-edged blessing is that the new venue has a ...shall we say Challenging floor.  The only two places I've skated in until now both have pretty hard and slippy floors so I'm used to getting a lot of distance out of each push, and coming to a sliding, more gradual halt.  The new floor is not only textured, but sprung, so it absorbs a good chunk of the effort you throw at it.  Great for dancing or running, not so fun for skating.  Just getting round the track took twice the effort, and picking up speed took twice as much time and distance.  We'd also stop twice as fast, and my residual forward motion kept making me over-balance forwards.  To me the surface felt almost gummy, or like trying to skate on a thin layer of foam.

It's amazing the different a new floor makes if you're not used to it.  It was as though a mental switch had been flipped in my brain.  In the first few minutes of warm ups, most of the confidence I had was knocked out of me - everything was suddenly so hard!  Suddenly all the things I could do, I couldn't do any more, or was scared to try!  I think the two weeks off skates and the fact that this was only my second session in new skates certainly added to it, but also I have a little mental voice that occasionally pipes up when I'm not sure I can do something as well as I think I'm meant to.  It usually just wails "I caaaaaaaaaaan't!!!" in response to any question or attempts to reason with it.  I could hear it faintly in the background as I tried to keep up with the pack.  To be fair, they were always going to be faster than me, but it felt like the floor was actively fighting me, which seemed very unfair.  It even made things like pack skating, which I'm normally fine with, harder.  When you're striding constantly just to maintain speed, and doing bigger and wider strides, it's much harder to keep yourself close to your team-mates than when you're just rolling along with little effort.

Fortunately it didn't stay that way.  We did some drills and games, and I calmed myself down a little.  All the older skaters were very patient and encouraging, and seemed not to mind that several of us were struggling to keep up, or that they had to explain everything, or that we didn't know how to perform a lateral properly.  They're also very good as commenting when we get something right.  I was constantly surrounded by advice (some of which I didn't even need and was a bit distracting.  We were doing transitions, and I had three people give me tips before I'd even tried one.  "Point and turn!" "Don't think too hard!" "Your body follows your head!" at which point I yelled back "I can DO it! SHUSH!" and a few seconds later performed a perfectly serviceable transition.  Sometimes I just need a bit of space to count to three and try something.  There is such a thing as too much help :)

We skated together for 90mins, and then the Dollies broke off to do scrims and the Newbies moved to the side of the hall to have freeskate time.  Again the floor proved a problem because by the time you'd built up enough speed to try a move, you were half way down the hall, but just to have freeskate time at all was lovely.  I made a point of trying all the things that I find unnerving, just to convince myself I could do them on the new floor so that I wouldn't get a mental block about it.

Achievements on Scary Floor:

• Laterals (it always takes me a few goes to get back into laterals each time we do them.  I must remember to TURN MY HIPS)
• Crossovers to the left, and some grapevines to the right.  I'd like to get basic right-ways crossover attempted soon-ish, but I still have trouble stepping that way.  
• Tried gliding but there wasn't much point as I lost speed so quickly on the floor I stopped almost before I'd started.  However, still balanced for longer than normal.
• Stepping.  Since your wheels barely move, this floor is great for it.  I did a mirroring game with one of the senior skaters and managed to copy everything she did, including some things I'd never tried before like 180 degree jumps and walking on my toe stops.  I also tried running forwards and backwards (more like waddling!) with stationary wheels.
• Hip whips.  I took two from a senior skater.  The first time was fine, but the second time she really gave me a massive shove and I went sprawling.  Got straight back up, no harm done.  I'm usually fine taking hip whips when I'm in motion, so I blame the fact we were stationary and therefore had resistance from the gummy floor :)
• Transitions again, including derby stops after, and they're really coming along.  I did them in shuttle runs, so that I was forced to do them at certain points rather than waiting for the right conditions.  I'd still like to do them at higher speeds, but I did feel more in control than usual, especially when turning anti-clockwise which is my less confident direction.  I must remember to ROLL before attempting to derby stop, as I need to be able to do them separately from each other.
• T-stops on one foot. The other was terrible.  I also did some plough stops, but on this floor I don't think they count!
• Backwards skating.  I only did two laps of this as picking up speed on the floor was so difficult.  I'm getting more used to the motion, although I've still not quite figured out the looking over your shoulder part.
• Two-footed jumps, straight up, sideways, and the new discovery of 180 degree jump in both directions WHILE IN MOTION!  That's something new!  I'm really pleased I landed them both.
• Knee-taps.  I mention this as usually I take a knee, slide to a halt, then get back up.  I want to get to a point of not stopping when I knee-tap, and I did a few today where I kind of bounced off the floor and got straight back up.  Hoorah!

and finally

• I kept up.  We weren't doing anything particularly hard, and I know the seniors adjusted down for us, but just to be training with them was inspiring and made me push that little bit harder against the Floor of Doom.  Everything they asked me to do, I did.  That's something to be pleased about.