August 2002
Week of August 4, 2002
Aerobics
A complimentary aerobics class was offered this week in my community to stimulate new membership. I attended the session with the intention of joining. I can drive to the class in five minutes or walk there in less that a half hour. This would provide a welcome break from commuting to the rink or park while increasing my weekly allotment of activity. Unfortunately, the class times will conflict with my skating schedule in the fall. The instructor is trying to find a location to hold additional meetings; but, so far, she has come up empty. During August, I plan to exercise with this group and hope for more amenable options next month.
The class was held in a building without air conditioning. While the weather was not overly hot, it was humid. Combined with the perspiration of rigorous exercise, I was literally bathed in sweat. Fully expecting to sweat during a workout, if I leave a skating or exercise session in dry clothes, I feel I did not get my money’s worth or spent too much time socializing. However, my leotard was soaked and wet ringlets of hair dripped down the back of my neck.
Aerobics combine dance movements with calisthenics and stretching, all set to music. After years of spirals, I am fairly limber and have no trouble with any of the stretches. However, I struggle to follow the quick steps of the dance exercises. Footwork is the weakest aspect of my ice skating, consistent with my aerobic floor work. Of course, I did not know the choreography and expect to become more familiar with it as I continue to attend these classes, but it was embarrassing not to be able to keep up or to be out of step, kicking to the left when everyone else had already switched to the right. Awkward as I might have appeared, I did not become exhausted and did not need to rest or walk through any segment of the workout. I might be clumsy, but I am in fairly good shape.
Only mild soreness bothered me the following day. The exercises I performed in class obviously utilize different muscles (or utilize them in a different way) than those regularly employed for skating. This week, I did aerobics twice and roller skated twice.
Week of August 11, 2002
Too Hot to Skate
Although I planned to roller skate in the park twice this week, I only got there once. The weather has been brutally hot. The day I went, I only distance skated, avoid in the outdoor rink all together. Light gray seal coating covers the floor of the rink, and the boards have been freshly painted white for the coming fall roller hockey season. The light colors and contour of the barrier seem to act as a lens focusing the sun’s rays on the skating surface. A piece of paper placed in the geometric center of the place could catch fire. Even in early morning sunshine, my skin begins to burn and sweat trickles off my face while practicing moves in the field. This week was too hot to attempt skating in that reflector dish, so I settled for quads on the trail instead.
I also attended two more aerobics classes and roasted like a pig in the non air-conditioned gymnasium. Actually, most of my perspiration was due to heat rather than strenuous exercise. Every time I attend that class, the instructor introduces a new dance step. Just as I think I am learning the ones from the last session, she complicates the situation by adding another, and I drop back to my uncoordinated starting point. If she standardized the exercises, my workout would be more effective because I would waste less energy concentrating on the steps and tripping over my feet. All of my effort would go into raising my knees as high as possible and moving with maximum vigor. When I feel comfortable with the routine, I enjoy the exercise and allow my body to swing with the rhythm, reaching a higher level of cardiovascular output.
One of the classes focused on body sculpting, using a length of rubber tubing with handles on each end. The tubing provided resistance during various calisthenics. Either my legs are very strong or I was not doing the exercises correctly because I felt very little strain. As a disciple of the “no pain, no gain” philosophy, I am suspicious of any exercise that does not hurt or leave me achy, preferably for a couple of days. Since I am new to aerobics, I expected a good deal of soreness but have gotten very little. I like to think it is because I am in good shape, which may indeed be the case since I do not get tired during class and continue to jog in place while many of the other students enjoy a quick reprieve as the music changes. Only the pushups and butt-firming drills make me twinge. Those bun sculptors are really wicked. Apparently there are muscles in the backside that a skater does not use very often, and this instructor found them.
I would actually like to attend aerobics daily. It is an excellent supplement to my skating and has to enhance weight loss.
Week of August 18, 2002
Puddle Jumper
Finally the heat relented and I enjoyed cooler summertime weather by roller skating in the park. Unfortunately, heavy rain had fallen the previous night leaving large puddles in the outdoor roller rink. I have skated around puddles before, always cautiously avoiding the water hazards. My artistic inline skates do not perform well on wet surfaces. Once I caught a wheel in a small, easily overlooked pool and slipped. Friction between wheels and ground propel a skater forward with each stroke. The water created a nearly frictionless environment and my skate hydroplaned like a bald tire on a flooded road. Too many puddles made freestyle inline skating impractical, so I decided to quad skate on the path instead.
The path had not been sheltered from gathering precipitation, but my quad wheels are better suited to dealing with wet patches. The highly textured asphalt further increased traction making sliding very unlikely. Still, I preferred navigating around wet areas instead of plowing straight through. Unfamiliar with the frictional properties of waterfowl droppings, I focused my attention on evading those. A goose turd under an unsuspecting skate wheel might be equivalent to the old slapstick “slip and fall on a banana peel” joke.
The next day, all but one tiny puddle had evaporated from the roller rink, inviting a basic skating skills workout. My alternating forward crossovers have become pleasingly fluid and my pivots have an attractive spinning quality. I worked on an interesting balance and extension exercise involving forward and backward gliding. While maintaining an upright carriage, rather than simply performing a rudimentary one-foot glide, extend the free leg as high as possible behind the body while pointing the toe outward. This is essentially a spiral with a vertical torso. Standard glides may be considered beginner moves, but most beginners cannot raise their legs very high without tipping forward at the waist. This created a pretty arabesque that naturally led to an attitude glide (a layback leg position with a straight body position).
Since I do not perform any noteworthy jumps and spins on inlines, I am left with developing skills that are often ignored such as toe point, extension, and posture. I look forward to including pretty gliding movements in my ice repertoire this fall.
Labor Day Weekend, 2002
Hitting the Duct Tape
I brought my rockered inline skates on vacation hoping to try them in a roller rink about forty minutes from our lake house. We stopped by the rink after lunch one afternoon to inquire about the public skating schedule. I entered the building and noticed a delightful ozone odor and a brisk chill in the air. Beyond panes of glass and sunken into the foundation to conserve refrigeration costs was a large beautiful sheet of white ice. My heart pounded with excitement and distress. I had brought the wrong pair of skates!
The young man who worked at the rink said it had been in operation for about two years, pre-dating our local telephone book. However, I am surprised that I never heard about this little slice of heaven by word of mouth or via the Internet. The fellow told me the roller rink was another block down the street. Like an idiot, I always assumed this structure housed the roller skating facility. I stumbled upon uncharted ice while looking for a room temperature floor.
While I would have preferred to figure skate, especially since I have only been on the ice twice this summer, I had to settle for roller skating. I have never tried my artistic inlines on an indoor surface, but have heard the skates tend to perform better in a rink than outdoors. Polymeric sealant coated the concrete floor, though I had hoped for luxurious maple wood. In places, the coating had cracked or peeled away. Instead of refilling the worn sections, an innovative handyman had patched the damage with strips of duct tape. Duct tape! The repair work was not isolated to one spot awaiting a more permanent solution, but duct tape band-aids were scattered all over the poorly maintained surface.
The floor was not only shoddy but also very small. The tiny skating area looked like a dance hall at the rear of an arcade. Typically tacky, the place had all of the earmarks of a Hicksville roller palace: a greasy snack bar with a large movie theater popcorn maker and cheesy diner furniture, air hockey, pool tables, video games, ugly wall murals, saloon doors opening to crumby bathrooms, a D.J. booth, flashing disco lights and an illuminated “all skate/couples/limbo” sign. Rows of rental boots lined shelves behind the skate counter. They appeared identical to those I remember from childhood forays into roller rinks. Intermixed with funky modern tunes, music that might have played twenty (or more) years ago when I was a teenager blasted over the speakers.
A skinny girl wearing low-rise quads manned the rental counter while also running the sound system and monitoring the undersized skating area. She was not a bad skater, able to do backward crossovers on fat wide wheels. Misplaced in time, this young lady belonged in my roller boogie childhood rather than in this age of half pipe extreme inlining to rap music. My husband and I assumed she was the owner’s daughter and may have even competed as an artistic or speed skater.
On the smooth floor, my rockered inline skates resembled ice blades more than I ever imagined. I actually had to remind myself that these are not ice skates and overconfidence could lead to serious injury. After a few laps of skating around the rink gracefully with pretty extension and carriage, I felt dizzy like a goldfish in a blender. I skated backward, did little jumps, pivots, and glides. I attempted two-foot spins, pivots into beginning one-foot spins, and the standard three-turn entrance into advanced forward spinning elements. I understood how an aggressive spin approach would be utilized and completed the three-turn in much the same way I do on the ice. However, the “sweet spot” was not where I expected it to be. My efforts did not result in rotation. With more indoor practice, I could probably learn a decent spin, but I do not have regular access to a roller rink and am concerned about confusing my muscle memory with inline skills that do not translate directly to the ice.
From a lovely inside spread eagle, I turned to begin backward crossovers but fell unexpectedly and skinned my knee. I had hit a strip of duct tape! My wheel balked at the slippery material and lost traction. For almost ten years now; I have avoided various obstacles including clueless public skaters, cracks, paint and sand coming through thin ice, and even bird droppings. I have navigated around various types of debris while roller skating in the park. However, I have never had to be wary of duct tape intentionally affixed to the skating surface. Now I have seen everything.
See more photographs from this skating session in the Photo Gallery.
Read about my first experience on rockered inline skates and my recent progress.
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