"my laugher is broken"
May. 31st, 2010 09:45 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
dragonlady7You know it's a good time when you come back from a weekend and your abs are all horribly sore from laughing. One teammate commented on Facebook that her "laugher" was "broken".
We met at our coach's house, just beyond Ft. Erie in Canada. Z and I arrived first, near noon, and while idly waiting for the others to arrive, I got horribly sunburnt. I thought it would be fifteen minutes, a half an hour at most, and so we sat on the lawn and talked, and I paid no attention to the time. After an hour, I realized my mistake. The burn wasn't my face, fortunately-- just my arms, and I was wearing a tank top, so a bit of my shoulders as well. Oops.
We rearranged cars, and headed out for London. I sewed a banner for Z to wear with his mascot suit. It said "K(n)OCKOUT" on it, the N being a subscript hanging off the edge of the banner. Get it? Kockout. In a chicken suit. Anyway.
Checked into our hotel, found the rest of the group, went over to the venue, and noticed that the referees, who were warming up, were making an odd swooshing noise as they skated. "What the hell is this floor?" one of us asked, walking over to look at it. The floor was painted concrete. It had a... surface.
"It's a sugar solution to add grip," we were told. We'd heard of such a thing. This sounded... you could see the wheel marks as people skated by. It seemed very thick.
We went and dressed, and were told we could warm up, but only in the outside skating lane, not the track itself. The outside skating lane, a ten-foot-wide area normally reserved for referees (and as a buffer between skaters and audience), had pillars in it, the roof pillars supporting the building. Um, not at all terrifying. They were heavily padded on one side, not so much the other.
We started skating. And it was awful. It wasn't sugar, we found out. They'd used straight Coke syrup, undiluted, in one of those pump-spray bottles like you use for pesticides, and had just spritzed it all over the track and let it dry.
It was exactly like you'd think it would be. Skating in syrup means that as you rolled, the surface pulled at your wheels, sucking them backward. It took four or five times the normal effort to make every stride, and you had no glide distance afterward; it normally takes me six full strides to round the track (counting one push with the outside foot and one pull with the inside foot as one complete stride); I had to take at least twelve on this surface.
And worse than the stickiness was the slip. Once you were beyond hip-width, once your entire wheel surface wasn't in contact with the floor (as in a normal stride; you sort of wipe the wheels across the floor as you go, ending with a push with the wheel just under your pinky toe on the inside foot, and just under your big toe on the outside foot), there was suddenly no friction, and the syrup acted as a lubricant instead and sent your foot sliding abruptly out from under you. Worse still, the toe stops of the skates had no friction whatsoever with the floor. We use them to start, or to recover from a hit, or to regain balance; any time a toe stop touched the floor, it would skid out from beneath you, and you'd be on your face or your ass.
And covered in syrup. Anything that touched the floor stuck to it. My new white laces were brown in a moment.
After warmup, the floor warmed up and the syrup melted somewhat, so the grip became even less and the slip more pronounced. And worse still, the paint beneath began to flake off. Our wheels, the toes of our skates, our kneepads, our wristguards, our legs and arms, began to become coated in gritty blue paint chips.
It was torture. Normally we scramble to be ready for our next lineup. For the first time ever, the coach said, in a timeout, "I need a power play! Who wants to go out? I need four fast skaters!" and we all looked at the floor and at the wall and mumbled, because we really didn't want to, all that much. I went out in more than 50% of the lineups that went out, which is a lot, and didn't feel guilty about depriving anyone else, at least.
The very first line I skated, the first jam of the night, I was pivot, which means I started on the front line and was meant to lead the pack. The whistle blew, I pushed off, the floor gave way, and I fell on my face, where I stayed for the next six or seven seconds, trying to find a surface of my body that had enough friction with the floor so that I could get up. At one point my opposing number, the pivot of the other line (we skate with two lines, and each line has alternating subs, but both pivots and both power blockers go out every time with their line-- we alternate the middle two blockers), fell, and spent a good thirteen seconds trying to get up. She tried a toe stop, and it slipped. She tried her skate wheels, facing sideways, and slipped. Her wristguards went out from under her and she wound up on her elbows. She finally levitated herself with sheer rage, slipped as she tried to skate away, recovered, and almost burned a hole in the floor getting out of there. I couldn't believe nothing had exploded.
The announcers, fuck them, never once mentioned that the floor was an issue. A good half of the crowd had never seen derby before. As Canadians, they all knew how to skate. They must have thought we were some sort of special ed group, developmentally disabled maybe. At least the hosting team looked just as stupid as we did. The jammers, who normally leap and run like gazelles on their toe stops, all took to this awkward hop-shuffle routine to start on their whistle. One of their jammers had so much trouble on the start that our girl had already made it through the pack before she caught up.
We started out ahead, and kept a narrow lead until nearly halftime, but then they caught on to our strategy and when our jammer was sent to the box on a track cut (YOU try stopping without re-entering illegally while skating in syrup!!), they got a big jam and went up by 15 points or so. After halftime we put our heads down and started to claw our way back, but it took until about the last ten minutes for us to finally pull even. In the last jam, with time expiring and us down by four, our jammer made a grand slam-- which means she passed every player on the other team, including the opposing jammer, who was trapped in the pack-- and was awarded four points instead of the five normally given for such. We went and conferred with the referees, and finally the scoreboard ticked up one point. We had won. We went wild, the audience booed us, we hugged one another and shrieked, the other team lined up so we went and gave them high-fives, we skated a victory lap, we took our helmets off and wristguards and hugged one another again.
And then the head ref said no, we didn't deserve that last point, they abided by their call of only awarding four for the pass, so the game wasn't over. Half the audience had already left, the other team had already started taking their helmets off too, and we all turned and looked at him like, "What?"
No, he insisted. We had to skate one more jam. It was so noisy in the place that I mis-heard him, and thought he was saying that the floor was so dangerous they didn't want to make us skate anymore so they were going to let it stand as a tie, which is contrary to the ruleset but I don't think anyone would mind really.
But no, we had to do one more. So we all put our gear back on, bewildered and frustrated and even less excited than before to go out and skate on that horrible surface-- which by now was all slip and no grip, so you could barely move on it.
Sudden-death overtime means that there's no lead jammer; it goes the full two minutes. Our jammer was exhausted. Their pack was exhausted. Their jammer was exhausted, but juuuust a little less exhausted than ours; she made it through for a pass, then ours made it through but she was back in, and she grabbed three points, couldn't get past the last blocker, fell behind the pack, and skated behind our jammer, who couldn't get into the pack. She couldn't move on the floor, and the two of them paced, heads down, exhausted, unable to catch up to the pack again, but with their jammer three points ahead, and time expired. They won.
Our coach said we should just go to the locker room and not shake hands again. "They already got their handshakes," she said. I shook my head and said "It's not their fault, lady. We can't look like jerks and make them feel bad for something not their fault." So the coach told the captain to decide, and the captain decided we'd better shake hands again.
The other team were rather subdued and awkward about it. "That was weird," they said, as they came through again.
"Yeah," we said. One turned and offered her behind instead of her hand, so we slapped that instead. It was cute.
So we went out to their afterparty and tore it the hell up. Whatever else you may say about us, we are undefeated in afterparties. We danced, we drank, we chanted random things. "Two words! Two words! Two words!" We lapdanced. We shook our asses. We terrified random passersby. We had nice conversations with the other skaters and their fans.
We mostly spent the whole night explaining to the locals what roller derby was. We're sort of wondering whether the local girls ever went out! The bout was well-attended, but nobody in the city seemed to have any idea who we were. Except for one random girl, who flipped Z off with no explanation.
"This is not a friendly country!" he said.
We made general asses of ourselves, had a great time, and went back to the hotel. There was a great deal of confusion over who had what room, and much running about the hotel ensued. But in the end we all had somewhere to sleep, and the next morning we rolled out, groggy but all accounted-for, and made it back to our coach's house.
Where the party was somewhat more subdued. We were all exhausted and sore-- skating on syrup was not exactly easy. None of us seemed formidably hung-over, but we were tired nonetheless. So we sat around and drank beer and lots of water, and ate enormous amounts of excellent food, and partook of Shots O'Clock, and generally had a lovely time. Most touchingly we had an impromptu little awards ceremony and gave our coach and bench manager cute little engraved trophy-things, which made them cry, and then all of us went around and said our personal thanks to them, which made everybody cry. I turned to the new boyfriend of one of the skaters who was sitting next to me and didn't know any of us, and said, "Just so you know, we never cry."
I don't know if he believed me, but it was true.
This morning we rolled hung-overly out of bed and made our way back to the States. I've slept all day and feel like death warmed over. The cat was overjoyed to see us, and slept on my face all day, periodically meowing at me when I hadn't pet her in too long. It was great, but I feel decidedly ill. I wasn't really drunk at any point this weekend, but I wasn't exactly not-drunk for a great portion of it, and that kind of long-term drinking is hard to maintain. I drank water like it was my job throughout the entire weekend and still was barely able to keep reasonably hydrated.
So my guts are unhappy and I'm groggy as hell today. But it was a great weekend.
I feel somewhat warmed-up for Pennsic, too.
We met at our coach's house, just beyond Ft. Erie in Canada. Z and I arrived first, near noon, and while idly waiting for the others to arrive, I got horribly sunburnt. I thought it would be fifteen minutes, a half an hour at most, and so we sat on the lawn and talked, and I paid no attention to the time. After an hour, I realized my mistake. The burn wasn't my face, fortunately-- just my arms, and I was wearing a tank top, so a bit of my shoulders as well. Oops.
We rearranged cars, and headed out for London. I sewed a banner for Z to wear with his mascot suit. It said "K(n)OCKOUT" on it, the N being a subscript hanging off the edge of the banner. Get it? Kockout. In a chicken suit. Anyway.
Checked into our hotel, found the rest of the group, went over to the venue, and noticed that the referees, who were warming up, were making an odd swooshing noise as they skated. "What the hell is this floor?" one of us asked, walking over to look at it. The floor was painted concrete. It had a... surface.
"It's a sugar solution to add grip," we were told. We'd heard of such a thing. This sounded... you could see the wheel marks as people skated by. It seemed very thick.
We went and dressed, and were told we could warm up, but only in the outside skating lane, not the track itself. The outside skating lane, a ten-foot-wide area normally reserved for referees (and as a buffer between skaters and audience), had pillars in it, the roof pillars supporting the building. Um, not at all terrifying. They were heavily padded on one side, not so much the other.
We started skating. And it was awful. It wasn't sugar, we found out. They'd used straight Coke syrup, undiluted, in one of those pump-spray bottles like you use for pesticides, and had just spritzed it all over the track and let it dry.
It was exactly like you'd think it would be. Skating in syrup means that as you rolled, the surface pulled at your wheels, sucking them backward. It took four or five times the normal effort to make every stride, and you had no glide distance afterward; it normally takes me six full strides to round the track (counting one push with the outside foot and one pull with the inside foot as one complete stride); I had to take at least twelve on this surface.
And worse than the stickiness was the slip. Once you were beyond hip-width, once your entire wheel surface wasn't in contact with the floor (as in a normal stride; you sort of wipe the wheels across the floor as you go, ending with a push with the wheel just under your pinky toe on the inside foot, and just under your big toe on the outside foot), there was suddenly no friction, and the syrup acted as a lubricant instead and sent your foot sliding abruptly out from under you. Worse still, the toe stops of the skates had no friction whatsoever with the floor. We use them to start, or to recover from a hit, or to regain balance; any time a toe stop touched the floor, it would skid out from beneath you, and you'd be on your face or your ass.
And covered in syrup. Anything that touched the floor stuck to it. My new white laces were brown in a moment.
After warmup, the floor warmed up and the syrup melted somewhat, so the grip became even less and the slip more pronounced. And worse still, the paint beneath began to flake off. Our wheels, the toes of our skates, our kneepads, our wristguards, our legs and arms, began to become coated in gritty blue paint chips.
It was torture. Normally we scramble to be ready for our next lineup. For the first time ever, the coach said, in a timeout, "I need a power play! Who wants to go out? I need four fast skaters!" and we all looked at the floor and at the wall and mumbled, because we really didn't want to, all that much. I went out in more than 50% of the lineups that went out, which is a lot, and didn't feel guilty about depriving anyone else, at least.
The very first line I skated, the first jam of the night, I was pivot, which means I started on the front line and was meant to lead the pack. The whistle blew, I pushed off, the floor gave way, and I fell on my face, where I stayed for the next six or seven seconds, trying to find a surface of my body that had enough friction with the floor so that I could get up. At one point my opposing number, the pivot of the other line (we skate with two lines, and each line has alternating subs, but both pivots and both power blockers go out every time with their line-- we alternate the middle two blockers), fell, and spent a good thirteen seconds trying to get up. She tried a toe stop, and it slipped. She tried her skate wheels, facing sideways, and slipped. Her wristguards went out from under her and she wound up on her elbows. She finally levitated herself with sheer rage, slipped as she tried to skate away, recovered, and almost burned a hole in the floor getting out of there. I couldn't believe nothing had exploded.
The announcers, fuck them, never once mentioned that the floor was an issue. A good half of the crowd had never seen derby before. As Canadians, they all knew how to skate. They must have thought we were some sort of special ed group, developmentally disabled maybe. At least the hosting team looked just as stupid as we did. The jammers, who normally leap and run like gazelles on their toe stops, all took to this awkward hop-shuffle routine to start on their whistle. One of their jammers had so much trouble on the start that our girl had already made it through the pack before she caught up.
We started out ahead, and kept a narrow lead until nearly halftime, but then they caught on to our strategy and when our jammer was sent to the box on a track cut (YOU try stopping without re-entering illegally while skating in syrup!!), they got a big jam and went up by 15 points or so. After halftime we put our heads down and started to claw our way back, but it took until about the last ten minutes for us to finally pull even. In the last jam, with time expiring and us down by four, our jammer made a grand slam-- which means she passed every player on the other team, including the opposing jammer, who was trapped in the pack-- and was awarded four points instead of the five normally given for such. We went and conferred with the referees, and finally the scoreboard ticked up one point. We had won. We went wild, the audience booed us, we hugged one another and shrieked, the other team lined up so we went and gave them high-fives, we skated a victory lap, we took our helmets off and wristguards and hugged one another again.
And then the head ref said no, we didn't deserve that last point, they abided by their call of only awarding four for the pass, so the game wasn't over. Half the audience had already left, the other team had already started taking their helmets off too, and we all turned and looked at him like, "What?"
No, he insisted. We had to skate one more jam. It was so noisy in the place that I mis-heard him, and thought he was saying that the floor was so dangerous they didn't want to make us skate anymore so they were going to let it stand as a tie, which is contrary to the ruleset but I don't think anyone would mind really.
But no, we had to do one more. So we all put our gear back on, bewildered and frustrated and even less excited than before to go out and skate on that horrible surface-- which by now was all slip and no grip, so you could barely move on it.
Sudden-death overtime means that there's no lead jammer; it goes the full two minutes. Our jammer was exhausted. Their pack was exhausted. Their jammer was exhausted, but juuuust a little less exhausted than ours; she made it through for a pass, then ours made it through but she was back in, and she grabbed three points, couldn't get past the last blocker, fell behind the pack, and skated behind our jammer, who couldn't get into the pack. She couldn't move on the floor, and the two of them paced, heads down, exhausted, unable to catch up to the pack again, but with their jammer three points ahead, and time expired. They won.
Our coach said we should just go to the locker room and not shake hands again. "They already got their handshakes," she said. I shook my head and said "It's not their fault, lady. We can't look like jerks and make them feel bad for something not their fault." So the coach told the captain to decide, and the captain decided we'd better shake hands again.
The other team were rather subdued and awkward about it. "That was weird," they said, as they came through again.
"Yeah," we said. One turned and offered her behind instead of her hand, so we slapped that instead. It was cute.
So we went out to their afterparty and tore it the hell up. Whatever else you may say about us, we are undefeated in afterparties. We danced, we drank, we chanted random things. "Two words! Two words! Two words!" We lapdanced. We shook our asses. We terrified random passersby. We had nice conversations with the other skaters and their fans.
We mostly spent the whole night explaining to the locals what roller derby was. We're sort of wondering whether the local girls ever went out! The bout was well-attended, but nobody in the city seemed to have any idea who we were. Except for one random girl, who flipped Z off with no explanation.
"This is not a friendly country!" he said.
We made general asses of ourselves, had a great time, and went back to the hotel. There was a great deal of confusion over who had what room, and much running about the hotel ensued. But in the end we all had somewhere to sleep, and the next morning we rolled out, groggy but all accounted-for, and made it back to our coach's house.
Where the party was somewhat more subdued. We were all exhausted and sore-- skating on syrup was not exactly easy. None of us seemed formidably hung-over, but we were tired nonetheless. So we sat around and drank beer and lots of water, and ate enormous amounts of excellent food, and partook of Shots O'Clock, and generally had a lovely time. Most touchingly we had an impromptu little awards ceremony and gave our coach and bench manager cute little engraved trophy-things, which made them cry, and then all of us went around and said our personal thanks to them, which made everybody cry. I turned to the new boyfriend of one of the skaters who was sitting next to me and didn't know any of us, and said, "Just so you know, we never cry."
I don't know if he believed me, but it was true.
This morning we rolled hung-overly out of bed and made our way back to the States. I've slept all day and feel like death warmed over. The cat was overjoyed to see us, and slept on my face all day, periodically meowing at me when I hadn't pet her in too long. It was great, but I feel decidedly ill. I wasn't really drunk at any point this weekend, but I wasn't exactly not-drunk for a great portion of it, and that kind of long-term drinking is hard to maintain. I drank water like it was my job throughout the entire weekend and still was barely able to keep reasonably hydrated.
So my guts are unhappy and I'm groggy as hell today. But it was a great weekend.
I feel somewhat warmed-up for Pennsic, too.
