I realize I'm not on week three of increased skating sesssions. 

My feet are gaining strength.  I do ballet foot exercises as I'm decidedly uninterested in any injury I can prevent. or the amount of couch time or bench time that would come with injury.  I have gorgeously healthy knees, ankles and hips, my back is a happy back.  My adult body is the result of a coach father and a mother who felt that "you only have one chance to grow bones and teeth" and fed us very well and with a great deal of thought and consideration.  I'm extremely grateful.

So it's not time to undo the gift now.

When I started derby, we learned to skate and hit fairly quickly.  From that point we transitioned into team practices.  For myself, I'd have preferred a far more gradual increase, to build muscle memory and also, skating uses lateral muscles and ... I don't know quite how to describe it but if you've skated in a rink you know... rink skating uses them unevenly.  Your inside leg develops differently than your outside leg.  I was in another sport for years and performed at a high level that also created a difference in my body like this: cross training was very important to long term structural health.  I'm sure each league does it differently, but skating is such a different activity and everyone enters at such different ages, experience and fitness.  I do daydream of derby again but I'll give myself my own year of rebuilding my skating muscles before I risk injury with the sort of punctuated, quick skating that you need to do to jam or the heavy hits of blocking.

For squad skating (I really don't know what else to call it) I want to take it long and steady.  I've set a week by week fo things I want to learn and work on.  So far so good.

So I've been going to the gym a lot more, and on the days I don't know, stretching and doing some additional work outs on that side of my body have helped.   I've lost about eight pounds in three weeks, which sounds startling but that's not from skating alone.  I've been lifting weights and on a structured diet as a project to reduce my weight - separate from skating and more related to a desire to be able to safely run long distances again.  I'm "up fifteen" now from the weight I've been my entire life.  My youngest is two and a half, for me I usually seem to be able to relinquish the weight when they turn three.   I've been struggling against this weight for the last six months. 

But it's amazing to feel the transformation in my body going into week four from week one.  Each session is about three hours at least, and by the end, I've been in constant motion.  Muscle definition is emerging from my legs and calves,  it feels like my body sings when it aches.  

So this was my third week.  I've slowly regained my feet and I spent most of last night skating backwards.  Not just skating backwards but working on weaving and remembering my comfort forwards or backwards.  I tried a few jumps - unsurprisingly to me I can jump and turn better than I can skate backwards effortlessly.  Next week I'm going to really focus on those turns and balancing on one foot to build my lateral muscles more.

That's the technical.  

But here's the rest.  Last night as I worked on things I said to a friend that I just wanted to feel what all the sensations of flying backwards felt like without the visuals.  Sometimes what I'm seeing, or the rink lights, seem to throw me off balance.  So my friend put out their hands and said, "Go ahead."  They are a steady, firm skater, and I doubt I could take them down.  

So I did.  with my eyes closed, I could feel the rink lights flashing across my eyes as I moved around.  The sound of the wheels underneath the music, and strangely and comforting, the speed, because for anyone who has ever been depressed, stuck artistically, or in a place in their life where things are less thank sink-your-teeth-into-it satisfying, momentum is important.  

It's not uncommon, I think, for adult athletes to feel very passionately about their sports. It's a chosen thing, for one, in lives that are largely dictated by smaller choices made against practical necessity.  

And in all of that, anything that brings that feeling of flying, that sensory experience that leads to an explosion of happiness in my chest, anything that brings that I will seize.

Ripping out your jeans is part of it, I guess.  

I am so rusty on backwards skating, but I can do it in a rink, including transitions.  This weekend I realized it's a whole different game outside, on sidewalks, but only after I went ass over teakettle shocking a little knot of tourists on the boardwalk.

I have to regain my skill at falling.

You simply can't learn to skate or do tricks without cuts, bruises and falls. That's why you learn to fall and fall well.  There's an art to falling and the old saying, "Fall ten times, get up eleven," only really is inspiring if you know how to fall without breaking your contract.  For me, I've taken years and years of judo and still do from time to time.  I've always had a strange sense of joy and power that I can be hit and actually sent flying and still land decently.  That said, it's nothing until you practice it.

Falling leads to cuts and bruises, even if you fall well.

I'm at the point where I remember why pants and skating have never quite felt like they are a good pairing.  It's somehow easier and more forgiving to wear tights, leggings, skirts, shorts, just about anything than pants - which bind up in the crotch and have rivets in the pockets that dig firmly into your ass like little teeth when you land leaving the oddest peppering of bruises on one's (in my case, ample) rear end.   I'm a minimalist, and so what I own  tends to be limited.. and expensive.  I don't fancy ruining any jeans that were carefully hand stitched in the USA that I've had for many years, but nor do I buy poorly traded goods new.  So I spent part of the weekend thrift store crawling with a specific slant to find good skating clothes with some success.  I know the traditional look, which is fantastic: short booty shorts, knee high socks, cute t shirt.  But where I live, even on a sunny day, it's chilly this time of year.  I do warm up skating but I need more coverage and yet I feel a pre-emptive slump of defeat when I think of wearing plain old work out clothing to skate as skating just ignites my joy in ways that the treadmill, despite it's... charms (I suppose?  It must be someone's bliss, somewhere) has never.   My work out clothes are pleasant, but they don't celebrate my joy. 

It's another meandering side step, as I wash dishes at night and watch skate videos, with some mild form of obssesion.  I'm in a new world, of Chicks in Bowls - it's entirely tempting - and I still must remind you that I was falling down skating backwards outside this weekend so my dreams are quite heavily laced with idealism and optimism at this point, probably from an outside perspective at least.  But I'm quite confident that with time, perhaps a lot of time, I'll get there. 

What's interesting is... I am an unusually determined person.  I have in the last year or so, felt I've lost my touch for it.  I've suffered some disappointments, no worse than others, I suppose, but sometimes it is hard to hold to my narrative that I tell myself of what I am doing as a creative person and why.  There valleys...and mountains...but what we are least equipped to deal with I think are the plateaus.  The long, steady pace that goes on and on for miles, days or even a year and you wonder... without those valleys or hills, how will I find the low or the high to use to push, to make something happen?  For anyone that sees the arts from the outside, this is almost always what it takes to get anything going, much less stustain it.  A few good pushes from inside, a strong donkey kick and you sit down, you write the damn thing, you sit down, you make the asking phone call, you take the chance, you show up.

I easily put more effort into my skating  last weekend than I have my own work this year.  I work hard for others, but for my own creative work, I haven't, not yet this year.   

Part of this writing is to trace that vein, that vein that connects what I love to what I create.  

So I stopped mid entry, and as late as it is, sent something I'd thought about doing but...hadn't...because... but now it's done.

And I'll keep skating and thiknin about these things. Maybe it will carry me somewhere.  Maybe it won't, and in another year I'll see be on this same plateau.

But the difference is, I have something I love to do now, helping me along.