Today I Am One!

I just had my derby birthday!  I joined the Dolly Rockit Rollers at the end of February 2014, barely able to stand on skates, but now it’s 365 days on and we just had a Minimum Skills test.

I’ve missed a few in the past due to my broken toe, then being on holiday, then an NSO fixture, and it didn’t really bother me because I knew I would never have passed everything anyway.  This time I was ready.  I was there, and I felt confident.

I passed everything

…except for two things.

 For some reason I’d developed a mental block on arm whips and jumping over a six-inch cone wall.  I just couldn’t seem to get them to work.  It was really weird because I’ve done them both before but it had been such a long time since the last time I think I just forgot how they worked.  It was really frustrating, especially to discover this on test day.  Two of my teammates have already moved up to mid-week practices and I know what level I’m at in relation to them.  I should have passed, but those two little things went wrong.

We had LAFS (lovely awesome fun skills) the next day and I put in a request for those two things, so basically the whole of our small group ended up doing the things I was weak at.  LAFs are a good chance to do some troubleshooting with the specific attention that there isn’t always time for in general Sunday practice.  Phil helped me figure out the arm whip problem – I was fully extending my arm and holding it too far back, so when I twisted my core there was a big lag in getting the motion to my arm.  Suckering my elbow to my waist and holding out my forearm more like a support bar solved it – a much sturdier arm and better torque when I whipped.

The jumping blip was solved by my teammate Emma.  I was trying the jump over and over, getting enough height, sometimes twice the required height, but either fell on landing or landed one foot after the other, not simultaneously like the min skills require.  I was getting more and more frustrated because I knew I could do it, I just wasn’t, and I couldn’t figure out why.  Emma was getting a drink and watching me, and suggested I try the jump at a higher speed.  I rolled my eyes a bit, thinking that would just lead to a bigger crash, but I lapped the track and came round again with a faster runup.  I jumped… and landed it!  Both feet together.  I did it five or six more times and landed it on every attempt.

Honestly I have no idea how the speed changed anything.  I know I overthink things, so it may just have been that I was trying to ‘work out’ the jump too much as I approached, which meant slowing my speed, which meant I didn’t have enough forward motion left to carry me through the landing after such a big jump.

Sometimes you need to work and work on something to improve.  And sometimes you need just need a friend to point out the one thing you’ve missed.

I CAN jump, and I CAN arm whip.  And I WILL get them both next time.

On a happier note, we did laps and I upped my personal best to 25.5 laps.  I made 25-in-5 for the first time on our last test day, crossing the line exactly as the whistle went.  I was totally stoked but also felt like it might have been a fluke or error.  Passing by a whole extra half lap this time was a massive boost to my confidence, and afterwards I was even able to identify a few places where my crossovers could have been a little  bigger, where I’d lost speed coming out of the corner.  I reckon I could push it up to 26 laps in a few more tries.  And then 27 is only a lap away!