How To Seriously Screw Up A Superman Slide

As I sit here to scrawl down this latest entry, Portsmouth is currently covered in a very Christmassy looking blanket of snow, which is kind of a rarity around here, especially seeing how we are located next to the sea, which generally ensures that everything gets covered in a thick layer of salt, meaning as a result of this that most snow rarely settles let alone falls here, so it’s nice to actually have some proper snow weather for a change. The downside to this situation though is the chaos that even the slightest hint of snow causes, with everything generally grinding to a halt, while the majority of staff at my work, generally using it as an excuse not to show up, while some of the slightly more dramatic members of the local public are no doubt at this moment in time, rambling to themselves about how we have angered the snow gods and no doubt dancing naked, in an attempt to bring back the sun or perhaps that's just a Cornish thing.

Okay now I have finished scaring your fragile little minds, with those shudder inducing images of naked hippy folks dancing, I think it’s safe to say that To find yourself in some degree of pain, the day after a hard derby practice, is something I find to be usually pretty normal, especially for someone as non-athletic as myself, whose daily exercise routine mainly consists of the walk to work and occasional run when I’m trying to make the ferry before I sails off. So after the first training session with the wenches, I could safely say that I was feeling it, especially seeing how everything bar my left arm hurt, thanks a combination of stiff muscle and general bruising from the numerous slams I tend to rack up over the course of a typical session. Still trying to figure out which pain was being caused by what is usually more difficult, as I get to spend the following days hobbling around like an old timer, with the overall condition not overly helped by having a job which requires me to sit at a desk for 8 – 10 hours a day, only further adding to the pains with the general daily joint pains. Still their training though intense was still a blast to do, while proving a great outlet for all the stress of having to deal with stupid people, moaning about about the latest failing of the engineers at work or our service in general.

Still this week I managed to add a whole new pain to the list, gained after running through “Superman Slide” drills. The Superman Slide is the more suicidal looking of the derby slides, involving the skater putting their faith wholly into their pads, by falling forward onto your knees then your elbows in a motion non to dissimilar to throwing yourself at the ground. It was while running through the first batch of these which triggered a sharp pain, almost comparable to a kick to the nuts, though perhaps not as lingering, occurring in the lower gut muscle / mass (please excuse my lack of fancy medical terminology), which of course I followed up with probably the least sensible course of action, by doing the same drill again, which surprisingly enough was once again followed by similar pain.

Whatever I have done has pretty much killed off any attempt to do anything, which requires the tensing of that particular area, which is actually a surprisingly large amount of things, for such a random area to injure, especially when I think about how I did it, which makes even less sense, much less the fact that I have manage to do something that has even confounded the vast (and occasionally questionable) medical knowledge of Google, which despite managing to real off a vast list of potential injuries, some of which I’m not sure are possible with the male anatomy, I had to resign to just labelling it a strained muscle and just get one with the best course of treatment for such things and to basically just suck it up and get on with things instead of acting like some big girls blouse, though the thing which honestly sucks the most is the lack of any bruising / hideous looking injury to show for it, so nothing to show for it here and I’m sure you’ll all appreciate not having to see a picture of my gut.

Okay outside of my various attempts to incapacitate myself this week, there was a focus this week on our starts, including the jammer start, which involves the extensive use of your toe stops as you aim to walk on your stops, digging them into the track as you move with a stilt like running motion, before dropping onto your skates in a graceful flow and not look like a your attempting to breaking out into some weird form of interpretive dance. Personally I’ve yet to break in the toe stops on my own skates, mainly due to currently lacking the required technique needed, for a successful toe stop, with previous attempts having worked to stop me, but only to quickly follow with a heavy slam, but if your not slamming your not learning right?

On the ref side of things the wenches now officially have two ref’s in training with both myself and my fellow David Lynch fan Michelle (a.k.a: Ic Hell) heeding the call of the striped shirt, which honestly is great, as it now means there are at least two of us, trying to make sense of the mountains of rules, which currently I have broken up into various sections and stuck up around the areas of the house where I’m likely to constantly see them, like the back of the bathroom door and the front of the fridge, with this tactic hopefully helping to drum them in, with the theory working on the principle of that if I see them often enough, that there is more a chance of them sticking. Still it will be interesting to see how this method works out….now if only there was a way of transferring this method to my skating technique.