The Boot Camp Diaries: Waah Waah Waah

I’ve been hanging out in the land of the discouraged, wallowing in its lakes of self pity. After not being on skates for a week because of Thanksgiving, I went to a Wreckers practice and left feeling like I might as well file myself under “derby lost cause.” I’m impatient–I want to be good NOW. I’m melodramatic– I take a bad practice to mean the end of my derby career. I didn’t sleep well and I cried a lot. At the Wednesday scrimmage, where I volunteer as an NSO (non-skating official), I nearly broke down and bawled on the bleachers when a friend asked, “But you’re still having fun, right?”  I really thought I was going to quit.

But on Thursday, I went to boot camp anyway. After years of giving up prematurely, I’ve learned that it’s best to just go. Even if I don’t want to, even if I was hyperventilating for an hour before practice, even if the idea of spending another two hours looking colossally stupid was enough to make me throw my skates into the Willamette River. It’s best to go anyway. And sure enough, within the first half hour of boot camp, it seemed silly to have wasted a week blubbering and theatrically declaring, “It’s just not for me.” Positivity comes naturally to some people. Others, like me, have to constantly be on our toes to keep pessimism at bay.            

Mel Mangles led practice on Thursday. We focused on pack drills and weaving. Weaving drills are particularly difficult for me because I’m basically the slowest skater at boot camp and my endurance is , let’s say, subpar. I usually drop out of the line because I can’t keep up, much less get ahead of the other people, as a weaving pace line requires. Eventually, I fell and collected myself outside the track. Mel Mangles came up to me and said, “You’re going to do this.” And so I did.

This was echoed at Saturday’s practice, led by White Flight. Again, we worked on our weaving and again I couldn’t keep up and again, I fell and stood outside the track. White Flight said, “You’re going to do this, because you CAN do this.” And I could. It was crazy. I remember watching this drill at boot camp in July with a dropped jaw saying, “uuuuuuuuuh…” Everyone, literally everyone, cheered me on. I never know how to respond to this type of attention. When I was a kid, I never let people sing happy birthday to me. That kind of thing makes me uncomfortable.  When I first started playing derby, I was always like, “Why are you yelling at me?” And I’m still not used to it. HOWEVER. It’s also really nice and if it hadn’t been for everyone’s support, I might not have pushed myself to finish the drill. It’s easy for me to let myself down, much harder to let others down.  

And so I’m not going to quit and perhaps I’ll be more prepared to argue with myself the next time that I want to. Derby is incredibly fun…when it’s fun. Coaches give advice with the assumption that you will improve, “When you start to _____ you will_____,” or, “Your______will be a fantastic asset when you’re able to_______.” There’s nothing finite here, everything fluctuates. Up and down, round and round. At the risk of getting all metaphysical, it’s like this: there’s the stationary world and then there’s the world on skates, which makes the other one blurry and out of focus.