author: Nicole J. LeBoeuf

Hark! A blog post! What's it about? Er... probably not writing, I'm afraid.

Well, for one thing, you don't want to hear me complain about how despite Conlorado's being over I can't seem to string two hours together for any one thing. Other things keep intervening. I'm hoping next week will look better than this one, honestly.

For another thing, the really exciting thing happening this week isn't to do with writing. My life is large, it contains multitudes of things one might do with a life, and as it turns out the really exciting thing was putting my skates back on for the first time in eight weeks.

Yeah. Got cleared to skate at my physical therapy appointment today.

As always, the therapist asked how I was feeling and how my knee was feeling. "Extremely well!" I burbled. The quad pain that scared me so much last week was gone the next day, and the cripplingly stiff calf muscles loosened up until I could do full-stride lunges without pain again. I attribute this to the foam rolling iterations. They hurt but they work. They're like... well. Have you read Laini Taylor's Daughter of Smoke and Bone trilogy? Magic in those books can work utter miracles, but working it requires the mage to suffer self-inflicted pain. That's the cost of magic in that world. Foam rolling is like a limited-scope miracle of that sort of magic.

So he had me do the usual warm-ups, and then the usual balancing acts, and then a lot of jumping. This is a situation where "He said 'jump,' I said 'how high?'" is the literal truth. How high? How long? How many times? I jumped on two legs and I hopped on one. I hopped in place, and forward, and in a zig-zagging sideways progression. I jumped from side to side, which felt like I was back at derby doing my Inside/Outside drills. Finally, I chugged a glass of water and he said, "I'm comfortable with you skating." And I, of course, said "Yippee!"

So I accompanied John to scrimmage tonight. That had been my plan already; I wanted to make myself available as an extra non-skating official, like last week. But I augmented the plan by bringing my skates and skating laps during warm-ups and half-time.

It felt great.

Oh, sure, my left leg was noticeably quicker to tire than my right. But all my moves were there, and they didn't hurt. I skated forward and backward, clockwise and widdershins, crossovers and sculling. I performed tomahawk stops and hockey stops. I got up and down on my kneepads helping one of the refs re-tape parts of the track. And I got to know the slightly wobbly character of the barn floor. Skating! I still know how to do it!

So I'll be attending a couple of Phase 1 practices to make sure I'm good to go, then I'll do Phase 2 until the coaches have time to assess me for minimum skills and team placement. And then everything will be back to normal. Derby will go back to eating my life right up, bones and all. And soon we'll move house, and I won't have to carry my skate bag up 24 steps after practice.

Now I'll post this, and I'll go do my magic foam roller ritual, and I'll probably say some very unprintable things while I do. My left IT band is already grumbling at me after all the unexpected work, so I expect tonight's foam roller session will be particularly eventful.