Sunday 9 January 2011

Skate + Ruby Tuesday = Food Hangover.

And so Saturday 8th January saw the first official training session of 2011. Attendance was awesome, everyone really made the effort, hopefully this is a sign of things to coma. Am pretty sure I mentioned that attendance was dropping off and we where seriously having to consider reducing our training down to 3 hours a week. Eeeeep!! But so far so good, lets keep the numbers up.

Well today was taken at a relaxed pace. We where in Channel View, its not really big enough to try and Scrimmage in so we focused on getting people used to being back on their skates. It was great to see both Emillie Mort'Em and Beth both back skating after having to take an enforced absence due to injuries. We are spending the next few weeks focusing on getting our Medium Level skaters through their Min Skills, so alot of emphasis was on weaves, one leg skating, jumps and pushes. As well as stopping, its seems everyone got shiny new skates for Crimbo and we are all trying to work out how to make them work. I am still having trouble doing a plough in my Vixens. I have also come to the conclusion that I no longer love my 88a wheels, they are awesomely sticky, which is what I wanted. Except now I am not able to sprint on the straights as fast or easily as I could on 95a, and so the never ending battle of finding the right wheel combo for my skate style begins. And am pretty confident that as my ability to play derby increases my need to change my wheels in and out will too.

We also spent sometime going over section 6 of the WFTDA Rule Book. We tried to spend sometime going over section 6. We are mainly focusing on the rules we are most likely to break at the moment, the Ref's are obviously learning them all, but us skaters are trying to get the more important ones. Cutting The Track was a particularly interesting one to read, digest and repeat. We have basically re-worded it so it now says; A skater may not go out of bounds to over or undertake the pack/another skater. Which I think makes much more sense than what WFTDA have written and yet it means the same. We also went over the types of Penalties you can get. they fall into 3 basic types. 1- No impact, 2- You cause a wobble, 3- You make someone fall. Do any of those 3 things by an illegal move and you will be in trouble. No.1 is usually just a warning, No. 2 will give you a minor and No.3 gets you a MAJOR, which basically means you are in the Sin Bin for a minute. Four minors equate to a major.

We also discussed 'Out Of Bounds' which is again written in a rather confusing and repetitive fashion. We again broke it down to meaning, you have to skate within the track boundaries for anything to count. If you are 'straddling' the line, i.e you have your left foot in and your right out you are considered to be out of play and as such you cannot score or block, but you can be hit by player who are 'in'. And again the penalties are the same.

After training myself, Emilie Mort'Em and Jinx'Em G went for a wonder around Cardiff and found ourselves in Ruby Tuesday. Now if you have never been I highly recommend it. We my have actually consumed our body weights in salad and fries. Bottomless freshly made Lemonade's are like heaven. Especially for myself and Emillie as we have embarked on the Roller Derby Workout Challenge, it started today (Sunday) so we gorged, Its the last time in 8 weeks we can have that amount of salad, red meat and chips in one sitting. In one day actually! Many giggles where exchanged. Jinx had never been in the company of me and my wife outside of training. I think it was an experience for her.

2 comments:

  1. We are brother ladies! :D hahaha poor Jinx!

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  2. Thanks for stopping by my blog! I love roller derby! The scene here in pittsburgh seems to be thriving pretty well. The last one I tried to go go was a sell out.

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