Rollercoaster

It's been kind of a tough week in future-goalie land. When you're training for a marathon, there are plenty of people saying, "You're nuts." but an equal number of people eagerly saying, "You can do it! It's hard but it's worth it!" It's pretty easy, if you have a little bit of stubborn in you, to trudge through it. Plus, information on HOW to do it abounds.

Well, when you get the notion to be a goalie, particularly as an adult with no skating experience, you get a few people saying you're crazy, but mostly it's this sort of neutral, yet skeptical, "Oh really? Okay." And this is from hockey people. Goalies even. There is absolutely nobody saying, "That's great! We need more goalies!" And there sure as hell isn't much information out there about the specific issues with being "old" when you start this stuff.

Maybe at some point in this journey, I'll understand this reaction. Right now, I absolutely do not.

But Coach Stalin and I went out to SLICE yesterday and had a good therapy session about it on the drive down, because she faced a lot of the same skepticism when she started learning to play hockey. I felt a lot better after the talk. Not sure what I'd do without Coach. :)

We had a very good skate. I'm so stuck on stopping and getting frustrated with that, so she had the idea of learning something new, which was just what the doctor ordered. We did a little warm up of swizzles, which I'm even getting pretty good at with my dumb leg, and then worked on backwards swizzles!

Since I'd already gone through the slow, painful lesson of figuring out edges while learning forward swizzles, I picked them up pretty quickly. Still need to build the muscles up to help smooth the motion out and figure out the balance a little better, but I feel good about making some progress.

I also need to get back to skating at least once more each week, preferably twice. I think I need to just put it as an appointment on my calendar and do it regardless of what's going on with work.

Also threw on the goalie skates for about 30 minutes, which is about all I can stand in new skates. They definitely felt weird, but I got used to them pretty quickly. I can certainly see how the need to have VERY strong legs is imperative. That's a LOT of blade on the ice, so it's always that much more ice to move through. Lots to learn but I'm glad to at least have a sense of the difference now. I'm acutely aware now of how much I I don't know. That's always a good starting point. Gap analysis, eh. :)

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My Aeros have lost their friggin' minds. Been watching too much Slap Shot or something but look at these rap sheets from the last two games:
Friday Night vs. Rivermen
Saturday Night vs. Wolves

At least Scotty beat the snot out of that punkass Deveaux. Man, I hate that guy. Can't accuse the boys of not playing with passion anymore.

But the Wild are kickin' it and Calgary lost last night. It's been playoff hockey for a month now, it seems, but now it's really down to the wire. Both of my teams play today at 5. I hate when they're simultaneous. Hard to pay attention to the audio of one and video of the other. But at least the Wild/Avs game is in HD. I absolutely can't complain. :)