sooooooo

expanding upon last night's post:

1. we ended up doing the whole assessment.  We broke up into groups of four, each group with its own off-skates assessor, who watched us doing our THANG.  

2. I basically made myself hold my arms out so that I wouldn't be tempted to use them to get up from my two-knee fall.  It worked.

3. The 27 in 5 never gets easier.  Even with a good pace, hearing "ONE MINUTE LEFT!" when I was on lap 24 still made me panic.  My average speed was 10.03 seconds a lap; yay me.

4. The cones were a bit nerve-wracking, especially when skaters ahead of me missed cones.  I concentrated on not snaking wide and just doing tight, controlled swerving and I aced it.

5. The coach of the A team did the assessment with us.  She's 35 weeks pregnant.  Yeah.

The whole thing ended up taking about an hour and a half, after which we scrimmaged.   We've evolved to the point where the skaters in "our" lineup (we've been skating together pretty much all season) have the hive mind thing working and our personalities mesh and we're awesome together.  (An interesting anecdote: we're all on different home teams.)  So we got to work together and work our magic.

I've become more of a "chaser" this season - the last-ditch effort person who tries to get the jammer one last time before she's out of play.  Because I play derby circa 2009, I try to accomplish this by going for a big hit (which the jammer invariably jukes around and I invariably fall after), but THIS time I made myself not do it, and concentrated on keeping her behind me and slowing down and ZOMFG POSITIONAL BLOCKING and it worked for about 1/4 of the track, at which point the pack caught up to us and she got reabsorbed AW YEAH GO QUEENIE GO QUEENIE.