Thursday Skate

Sometimes the skating gods hold you aloft, steady you, allow you to suddenly do the thing you've been tearing your hair out over for weeks, and give you beautiful ice....

And then some days, they dump 50 teenagers on your tiny Galleria rink, screeching and falling everywhere. They give you The Worst Ice EVER. Melting and scraped to pieces, even after the "Zamboni" has gone over it. And then, after you've spent an unproductive hour and a half skating in these miserable conditions, they knock you on your ass while practicing stops.

I'm pretty sure my blood pressure was off the charts by the time I got home from this skate last night. I basically told Coach Stalin as soon as we hit the ice that this wasn't a lesson skate. It was a "survival" skate. Don't bother bossing me around tonight.

I will say, it's a lot easier to stop on that soft ice, which is why I fell... I'd been practicing on the soft (melting, slushy) ice at the end of the rink and then went to the center because all the figure skaters had left, but the ice was harder there and I just bit it. Not nearly as hard as last time, thankfully. Coach skated over and said, "You worked hard enough today." :)

But as I said, I worked on stopping a bit, skated most of the time working on keeping my knees bent and using good stride form. The rest of my energy was spent dodging falling teenagers and giving them all as much stinkeye as I could muster.

Though at one point, a group of guys was skating past me toward Coach and they were crowding her in a way that sent up a red flag in my head, and I instantly knew what it felt like when teammates stand up for each other. My only thought was, "If you f'ing touch her, you're all going down." Hah! Like I would have really done anything but that was the very visceral reaction I had to seeing that. Of course, I was seriously worked up at these youngsters anyway, so it wasn't a far reach to want to beat the snot out of them.

I'm resting up today, because tomorrow I'm waterproofing the deck and that's going to be backbreaking. Though if I feel so inclined, I might do a little yoga so I can make it through the Aeros first playoff game tonight. Pondering whether to just listen on the radio or invest the $6 in watching it on B2. Hopefully I can get a quality report from other subscribers before I go in for it. It's bad about 80% of the time, it seems.

Wild are down 2-3 in their playoff series. It sucks but Theodore is just f'ing lights out right now. We just couldn't get the puck past him. Backstrom is average as usual, particularly considering our depleted defensive corps. However, Reitz did a good solid job for his first game in over a month AND his first NHL game this season. Pouliot needs to gain 10-15 lbs so he isn't shoved off the puck so easily. Strong on the puck, Pouly! Strong on the puck!