I want to talk a bit about being gentle. Yes. In Derby.
I know.
Weird.
Derby is grit and exhaustion and hard wins and heartbreaking losses and hurting muscles and training, training, training. Derby is amazing, dedicated team mates and clear goals and daredevil dreams.
It is. It really is. But I am going to come out of the tough-girl closet (stop laughing everyone who knows me in person) and say: if you want to keep on doing it, then I also think you have to find room to be gentle. To your body, to your mind and to your team mates.
Let’s talk about our bodies first. Skate anti clockwise in squat position for 5-10 hours a week. Throw in some contact. It doesn’t take a physio to see that you need to cross train if you don’t want to end up as the hunch back of notre dame being a physical description instead of your skate name. So we cross train. If you are like me, you do that by lifting, bro, and agressive bouncing (also known as plyometrics). And after a few years of this… I was beginning to look like one of those twisted up dead spiders you find upside down in the shed.
So… I yoga-ed. Secretly. I used online classes to try and smooth my crunched up muscles and try and talk things out with my hips. And my knees. And my shoulders. At first I tried to push in yoga the same way I do in Derby and for Derby. I was trying to work out how to ‘win’ yoga.
Those who do yoga (or are more balanced human beings) will know that it doesn’t work that way. Bit by bit I began to relax into it. I started picking yin classes. And my body began to unravel. Despite that – I felt a bit guilty about the time I was spending on myself in yoga. It felt indulgent. Maybe I should trade a yoga session for an additional weights workout?
But I pretty soon realised that it was translating into derby. I stood up straighter after a training session and those persistent niggles (hips, back, knees) were fading to an afterthought. It had an epic effect on my helter skelter mind too – but that is for the next post.
This isn’t a blog to tell you to take up yoga. The important thing is finding some gentle, some restorative, for your body in amongst the hard, striking action that is derby. We push so, so hard and to balance that as athletes and as human beings we have to find the gentle too. Because, you know, yin and yang. (Also, that always makes me think of pandas and they are awesome). Maybe your gentle is yoga. Maybe it is swimming, or walking in woods or getting a massage. But by finding out what it is for you and making unapologetic time and space for it – I think your body will thank you by being able to derby for longer.
After a year of online classes I finally made it to my first studio class today. I had been procrastinating. Because in my head yoga classes were for when I retired for derby. When I had more ‘time’. Then I realised that they weren’t mutually exclusive and by creating time for both – they enriched each other.
Namaste. Skate til you puke.
IT'S A HARD BLOCK LIFE 