Enjablog

About 3 weeks ago, I went roller skating for the first time since I was a kid. I ice skated in middle school, but ended up quitting once I got to high school because I didn’t have time. I rollerbladed a few times in the interim, but this was my first time on old-school quad skates. It went pretty well, but I couldn’t stop at all.

A week later, I bought a pair of third-hand (foot?) skates from one of the other girls training for the derby. I’ve been training about 2 hours/day, 4-5 times/week since then. Tryouts were Tuesday night and I found out last night that I made the cut for Fresh Meat Camp!! There’s going to be at least one more set of cuts. But if I make it through the 12-week training, I’ll be eligible to be drafted onto one of the teams. I am *so* excited!

The toughest thing for me so far is getting over my fear of falling. For the most part, I’m geared up in elbow, wrist, and knee pads, plus a helmet and mouth guard when I’m doing anything crazy. So it doesn’t actually hurt that much when I fall. And once I convinced myself of this, I was able to learn new tricks. I even jumped over 6″ cones at tryouts for the first time!

Thanks to Lenny for actually remembering where his rollerblading pads were and letting me borrow them! And thanks to Seamus (Healey’s 7-year-old) for loaning me his elbow pads! And big, big thanks to Ian for making me dinner the past few weeks when I got home at 10pm starving.

Training starts next week… and I’m missing the first practice because I’ll be at a conference for that one evening. Oh well. I’ll be here the rest of the summer.

Oh yeah. And I graduated!