another night, another derby practice.

So last night was scrimmage.  Preceded, of course, by about half an hour of stretching and jogging and all the lovely things I hate so very much.

I volunteered for jamming again.   Two majors in my first attempt, whee, but in my second, against one of the best A team jammers, I got lead and scored four points to her zero.  Yay!

A few of my teammates have different ideas for strategy than I, which is annoying, but the only thing you can do is go along with it.  It's better to all be doing the same thing than everyone doing their own thing.

so! um. I'm just going to take a nap here

So I had my first A team practice last night.  I got the impression it was not as hardcore as it will be in the future.  It was mostly drills and the like - there are some people who still need to be placed on a team, so the tryout process was still going on - and I slogged my way through it more or less.

Afterwards, I met with the A team coach and she showed me my evaluation sheet for the tryout process. They graded it out of 100 - if you got above a 60, you're an alternate, and if you got above a 75, you're an A team member.  I got a 66.25.   Basically it boiled down to:

• my fitness is crappy (I got a 4.5 out of 10)
• my agility is crappy (I can't do hockey stops to save my life, I bobbled the obstacle course in a buncha places* and the less said about my one-on-one positional blocking, the better)
• my attitude is great and my team work is really good as well.

Then I went home and could not turn my brain off to save my life. I think I got about an hour and a half of sleep, tops.

Gaaah. We'll see how long I can keep this up.
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*I had an off day on agility and skills day (and the coaches noticed this as well).  There are one or two things I screwed upon the obstacle course that I know I would nail on a second attempt, and I got marked off on a thing I wasn't aware that I had to do (I went first on the obstacle course, and after the second or third person they told us we had to do our tomahawks in both directions).

Almost dead but not quite

So, last night was our first B Team season practice.  I am excited for the season!  Yay!

I discovered that I'm absolutely horrible at one-on-one positional blocking.  I can't get around people, they can get around me easily.  I do much better with other people.

I had a few fancy footwork moves, yay me.

I have to admit I'm a little bit terrified about tonight - partially because it's an A team practice, partially because I'm meeting with the A team coach who's going to give me a review of my tryouts and suggestions for the upcoming season.

We shall see what happens, I guess.

Death Paces, 2013 Edition

Half an Hour Before I'm Supposed to Be at Practice:

Me, lying on my bed, yelling "FUCK I DON'T WANT TO GO!!!!!!!!!!!"

But I went.  It was okay.  I survived; I didn't throw up.

Tonight is B team practice, tomorrow is A team practice.

Wednesday is when I die.

ugh/um/yay?

I am SO glad I kept up on exercising during the break because I would have been dead, dead, dead without it.

It probably also would've been easier if I'd remembered (a) my sneakers and (b) my helmet. (That's what happens when you bring everything in from your car to clean it and fix it and replace stuff.)  I had to borrow one from the Gear Bin.

So we had about half an hour of off-skates (jogging, stretching, burpees, squats, blargh) and then on-skates ("on one whistle, go down on one knee!" TWEET! TWEET! TWEET! TWEET! TWEET! TWEET! TWEET!) It was at this point that I threw up.

After that I was fine, though, and went on to scrimmaging.

I can only stay for about an hour and a half on Thursdays 'cause of Maverick being at home, so I only got to stay for a little bit of the scrimmaging.  I ended up jamming twice and.....

.....it went pretty well!

I wasn't lead jammer either time, but I was able to break the pack both times (each time, there was someone on the other team even with me who tried to knock me out, but I was like DON'T LOOK OVER AT HER JUST GO GO GO GO GO FORWARD and was able to outrace her).  The first time I was almost at the pack for a scoring run when the lead jammer called it, the second time everyone was all sort of congregated at the inside of the track and I thought "please don't let them go to the out right now, please don't let them go to the out right now" and went full speed around them on the outside (at one point I ended up on one skate) and got three points.  It was awesome.

I just hope they don't think that I'm perma-jammer material.  We really only have two perma-jammers and one other woman who likes to jam but gets a lot of penalties.

(There were also a few situations where someone would bump me out of bounds and start skating backwards, but I was able to quickly get in behind her and keep going, even as she was still skating backwards.)

Of course, it wasn't all perfect - I got capped at a really inopportune moment and the other team's jammer just breezed by all of us - but beyond that I was quite happy with my performance last night.

Whee!

yay!

Today's the first practice of the new season!  Yay!  It looks like it'll be a combination of league administration/meeting stuff and scrimmage.  Whee!

do pushups count if you go down enough so that your arm forms a 90 degree angle, or do you need to have your chest touch the ground?  Because if it's the former, I can do one pushup from my toes.

Queenie's 2013 Resolutions/Goals

• at least 20 minutes of exercise a day
• get rostered for an A team bout
• actually play in an A team bout (their lineups tend towards having people be benchwarmers)
• become a full-fledged member of the A team
• be able to do five pushups where I’m not on my knees
• attend at least 75% of the Sunday morning Death March practices