just keep moving...

I'm right slap bang in the middle of a house move at the moment, so it feels like I do nothing but sort through masses of junk, dust and dead spiders (there have been LOTS of those, especially since I moved the chest of draws out...there was two years worth of junk under there!). Oh, and skate. I've been doing my level best to attend every session, even when tired...Kat is generally pretty good at giving me a motivational prod to get me moving, and I'm always glad afterwards.

Training sessions seem to be falling in to two categories for me at the moment: there are the ones where everything seems to 'click' and I feel like I'm making progress, and there are the ones where I seem to have two left skates and end up frustrated and annoyed with myself because it's like being back at square one again!

Sunday's training session fell in to the first category: during drills I felt confident and did some pretty good booty blocking/plough stopping during our waterfall drill (which I loved!) and even managed a pretty decent jamming speed (well, for me...we have some super-fast girls in the team and I'm nowhere near them, but it was progress for me!). I got some praise from BB, although she did chide me for grabbing (a recurring sin, I'm working on it though!). I felt so good at the end of that session, like things were finally falling in to place.

Then came Wednesday's session, which was definitely category two. It all started out well enough: warm-up laps with BB calling out different instructions on the whistle, eg one knee taps, plough stops ect ect. Fine, fine, so far so good. Then came transition stops. That's ok too, I can do those...when going slowly. But oh no, we had to do them AT SPEED! Eeeeeek! It's fair to say I wussed out pretty badly on these, I kept slowing down from my skating pace to turn, and that's no good because in the long run I need to be able to do these FAST. We moved on then to two packs, all of us numbered one to four. When BB called out our number we would have to do falls/stops in the pack. If we made contact with another pack member we had to do 5 push ups in the middle of the track...I ended up there 3 times! In a game situation failing to fall small and flailing is a minor, so it's best we learn good habits now! After my this we then did a 'hammer and nail' - basically we got in to groups of 3, 2 blockers and 1 jammer. The blockers would then whip off one another to booty block the jammer. All very fun, but because I'm still working on my lateral movements I felt like I just wasn't getting in the jammer's way enough and they would just nip round me. For our cool downs BB has been getting us to skate backwards...I can sort of manage it for about 3 seconds, then I lose all momentum. I feel like I don't know what to do with my weight: does it go back? Forwards? I'm still none the wiser. Reeshi saw I was struggling and gave me some helpful pointers, but then I got a little over confident...and that's when my big comedy fall happened. As usual, I hadn't bent my knees enough so when the slip happened, my wheels went out from under me, my legs flailed and *SMACK* down I went. I managed to hit my ass, my upper back and my head all in one go...nice one, Jo. I rolled over and scrambled up pretty fast, but it really shook me. My head was hurting and my back definitely wasn't happy about the sudden trip to the floor. Lesson here? BEND YOUR KNEES!! ALWAYS!!

So, my goals this week:
1. LATERALS, LATERALS LATERALS. I will conquer these!
2. Transition stops at speed, without plough stopping first
3. Pack awareness: keeping my hands to myself and skating closer to the rest of my pack.
4. WFTDA rule-learning.
5. Move house without my head exploding from the stress!

There is a silver lining to this moving malarky though: one I get my bond back I plan to treat myself to awesome skates, and since Kat A Clysmic has already broken her nylon plates I'm going to get aluminum ones. Here are the bad boys I have my beady eye on: http://www.bruisedboutique.com/onlinestore/index.php?main_page=product_info&cPath=103_112&products_id=339

In other news, we've pretty much sold out our fundraiser! This makes me very, very happy indeed. It looks to be an awesome night, so I will hopefully see some of you there!

Until next time...