Getting Back Out There

Today I head back to derby.  It’s been three weeks since I hurt my knee, and while I am still not totally pain free, my range of motion is almost back to normal and I felt pretty stable on skates when I was skating in the house this weekend.  

I generally do not google medical conditions, but I did look at WebMD’s section on knee pain and it seems that I probably sprained my LDL.  That’s a ligament that runs horizontally in the knee area, and it can be injured when force is applied from the inner knee to the outer knee.  It’s rare compared to an MDL injury (force from outer knee to inner knee), but when I fell, my right leg shot out to the side as if to do a side split, and I definitely felt my knee pull in a rightward direction.  There’s really not much to be done for a sprain (other than all the icing, elevating, and resting I have been doing), but I will dig up one of M’s many knee braces and wear it to practise.

I had just barely gotten to where what I was doing could be described as “skating” (as opposed to “doing whatever the hell it takes to move forward”), so I know that I’m probably going to be back to square one in terms of my learning.  I also need to keep reminding myself to work at my own speed.  There’s a big part of me that feels like I “ought” to be doing what the rest of the fresh meat (newbies in derby lingo) are doing—but most of those girls, even though they started after me, already knew how to skate.  I am so used to being the one who catches on fast and is ahead of everyone else when it comes to nonathletic matters, that it is hard to be in an activity where that is not the case.  However, it’s a good lesson and a good learning experience for me.

Another beast to slay is my anxiety about falling again.  Prior to my fall I had the impression that once I got my first big fall out of the way, I’d brush myself off, see that I was totally fine, and thus feel less anxious about hurting myself in a fall.  Except that’s not how my first fall turned out.  I didn’t hurt myself badly, but I have spent the last three weeks learning about just how often you use your knee to move around and how important regular knee movement is to…well, functioning as a normal human being.  So I will be giving myself extra reminders to RELAX my body, as well as reminders that 99% of the falls in derby are pretty harmless.

I’m also going to get back into my outside-of-practise training.  For now, that does not include attending open skates at the rink closest to me.  Though it seems like common sense that I would want to get as much skating experience as possible, the few times that I have gone to open skates have mostly been stressful.  Practise is a pretty controlled environment.  The faster girls know how to safely get around the slower girls, and generally the fresh meat are separated from the experienced girls for most of practise.  I can focus on relaxing my body, improving my balance, and generally learning how to skate.

Open skate is another thing entirely.  There are little kids, who stop, start, and fall at random.  There are show offs who think nothing of whizzing by you so closely that they almost brush you.  There are teenagers who like to just stop and chat while still on the rink floor.  For someone who knows how to skate and has even just a moderate amount of skating experience, avoiding these things is not hard.  However, for someone as new as me, for whom skating/avoiding are not automatic at this point, it’s a nervewracking experience.  I’m still at the point where I need to think about skating in order to be able to skate.  I need to concentrate.  And at open skates, I spend all my time trying to anticipate the moves of other unpredictable forces—which turns me into a really heavy, dangerous, unpredictable force myself.

Does this mean I won’t ever skate outside of practise?  No, not at all.  Once I get to the point where I have more control on my skates, and skating is a more automatic process, I’ll gladly attend the open skates because at that point, it will be very useful for me to learn how to predict and avoid obstacles.  After all, a big part of derby is predicting and avoiding obstacles.

This also doesn’t mean, though, that I don’t do anything outside of practise.  Prior to my injury, I had been doing 100 squats per day for about three weeks, and I had just added in this series of crunches about a week earlier.  I’m going to start adding both of those in again—the crunches at 100 per day, and the squats according to how much my knee can take.  Also, since the weather is getting a bit cooler and more tolerable, I’m going to head back out onto the Prairie Path to build endurance.  A lot of the new girls live close by, so I am planning to see if any of them want to join me.  Finally, I’m going to work on finding an OnDemand yoga workout that I like and adding that in once per week to start.

So, a bit of anxiety, but mostly a lot of excitement and some big plans!