Tag Archives: Assassination City Roller Derby

OFFSKATES WORKOUT WITH ACRD

How Roller Derby Saved my Life

I originally wrote this on my league forum as a post for the fresh meat group I was coaching at the time. I shared it on Facebook later for a rec league group I was training, and by request I’m sharing it here now in its original entirety. I hope it continues to inspire and motivate aspiring derby athletes.

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I’ve been meaning to put this out here for awhile – I posted it on my league board recently in a nutrition and fitness thread for my freshies. There aren’t a lot of old guard left who remember what my life was like when I first joined Assassination City & I don’t want anyone to ever assume that I’ve always been who and what I am, because it’s taken a lot of hard work to get here.

This will be really, really long, so bear with me. It’s only the 2nd time I’ve ever said it all out loud, and I talk a lot. Plus, I’m a narcissist who needs visual aids to fully illustrate the changes my body has gone through, so you get pics too.

I was small (unhealthily so, but that’s a confession for another time) until I hit my early 20s, then birth control (& later fertility meds – oh, the irony) + eating way too much crappy food + sitting at a desk all day reshaped me. I weighed about 155 when I finally became pregnant with Victoria – then I put on 63 pregnancy pounds. Yeah, that’s not a typo. I’m 5’4″ & I weighed 218lbs when I checked into the hospital. That’s over twice the size I was when I met V’s dad. Some of it was the swelling from pre-eclampsia, but most of it was the fact that I used pregnancy as an excuse to eat everything in sight (mostly processed garbage & greasy fast food) & I told myself that walking the dog was actually real exercise.

Here’s what I looked like pregnant (with my best friend Jackie O’NiceAss @ her baby shower):

Our kids were born two days apart.

And right after I had V (rare pic of natural haircolor):

V had severe GERD, which took a trip to the emergency rom and several specialists and procedures to diagnose. Sickly, unhappy new baby + scary new body and wild hormones did a number on my self-esteem, so I spent the first 4 months of V’s life in misery on so many levels. I didn’t realize at the time I had PPD, but I can see now how bad it really was.

When V was about 4 months old, Jackie O & I started talking about roller derby again. We’d heard about it for the first time @ the baby shower where the above pic of us was taken & we had made a pact that we would join after we had our babies. After researching local leagues, I attended a DDD bout one weekend and an ACRD bout the next. Dude, I was hooked within the first 2 jams. It was pure awesome. I contacted ACRD about 2 hours after their bout & joined within the next month (summer of ’06).

My skating background: rink rat as a kid + speed team when I realized that skating was faster than running (I’ve loved running since I learned how to do it). I hadn’t been on skates in 17 years, though. I went to a public session the day before my first practice and rented a pair of brownies. I was on the floor for 15 mins when a 12 year old asked me to teach her how to cross on the corners, so I guess it came back to me pretty fast. Muscle memory amazes me.

First practice: I lasted 45 minutes. I was so out of shape! I’d been walking every day & had progressed to light jogging again since I had V so I was probably down to 185 when I strapped on my skates. My bad knee hated me bc of all of the weight I was forcing down on it. I made it through the entirety of the next practice & every practice after that, & my body and mind began to transform.

In my first year of derby, I lost about 25 pounds…I didn’t do much else besides skate. I was eating less, but still eating like crap – my first home team, La Revolucion, used to get bourbon & pancakes @ Bandera after practice. Not exactly the best post-exercise nutrition. Still, I was a pretty decent jammer & I used my size to my advantage – but more importantly, a year of hanging out with a group of strong, beautiful, confident women who come in all shapes & sizes reshaped my self-image & helped me love myself again.

La Rev Py

I shattered my leg (11 breaks in the tibia/fibula) on June 6 of ’07 – had surgery June 11 (2 plates, 17 screws and one stabilizing rod), attended the pre-bout party on June 15, & went to the bout + separated from the Giant on June 17. It was a busy week. The Divorce Diet will make you drop weight fast, but I don’t recommend it – nor do I recommend crawling into a bottle of whiskey for a year, which is what I did. Weight fell off to the point that people were asking if I was doing coke. I think I was probably 112 @ my skinniest – West Texas flung me around the rink in July of ’08 (my first bout back as a skater) like a rag doll.

Scary Py.

** Around this time, I started practicing yoga + meditating every day. I needed to regain my balance in every sense of the word. Yoga changed a lot about my life for the better – I cannot say enough good things about practicing on a regular basis. I healed physically, mentally & spiritually through yoga. It made me more mindful of every bite I put in my mouth, every drink I took, every minute wasted in a bar or stuffing my face in front of the TV that could have been filled with something meaningful & productive. I also started keeping a journal, which made it easier to track whether I was stress-eating or forgetting to eat bc I’d drank too much. A journal shines so much light on what’s going on inside you, & that helps shape the outside. **

I sprained my right ankle in Dec ’08 but kept skating on it in pain ’til about Feb ’09. I do NOT recommend that – if you have an inversion sprain, get off your skates & heal. I opted for 3x per wk physical therapy bc I wanted to recover as quickly as possible. Physical therapy strengthened both ankles, plus it helped build some muscle in my legs (stability exercises are SO good for your entire lower body & core). It made me feel stronger, & I love feeling strong! I started running again & I bought a couple of circuit-training DVDs featuring HIIT (high intensity interval training, which is the quickest way to get in bad-ass shape). I highly recommend Jackie Warner’s DVDs – she will destroy you in a very short amount of time. The key is to understand that exercise is supposed to be uncomfortable to some degree – you have to sweat to burn fat & build muscle.

After a year of lifting @ home, Ripper talked me into joining her gym in May ’10 – I hired a personal trainer & fell in love with her job, so I started the NASM PFT program in July ’10 & started hitting the weights & Stairmaster hard. I graduate/become certified in April of ’11, but I’m already working with clients now based on my personal experience, my experience training/coaching in the league, & all of the obsessive reading I do about fitness, nutrition & life coaching.

So, to make a short story very, very long, this is why I now look like this:

I’m impressed if you made it through that long ramble. I feel a bit as if I’ve exposed my soft underbelly to you all, figuratively & literally. I work my ass off on the daily bc I know I am never finished – I’m never going to be a final product, I’m always a work in progress. We all are. I take my nutrition one day @ a time, focusing on eating clean 95% of the time & I don’t beat myself up if I eat a yummy fatty treat every now & then (although once I started eating clean, I stopped craving sugar and fat as much – I’m repulsed by fast food and most processed crap now). I break a sweat @ least once a day – cardio is good for the body, heart, mind, soul. Cardio is good working meditation for people who can’t hold still for long (like me). Lifting weights makes me feel powerful – that power carries over into life outside the gym and off the track. Lean muscle burns fat even when we’re asleep, so my body is a self-maintaining machine. I quit drinking on Nov 1, 2009 and I don’t miss it @ all. I realize I am an extreme case and your mileage may vary – I don’t expect anyone to quit drinking or enjoying an occasional piece of cake – I’m an all-or-nothing kind of gal, so it works for me.

Bottom line out of all of this, the one point to take home with you – derby can change your life in many positive & amazing ways, but it’s only the beginning of being truly fit & healthy. Think of derby as the gateway drug to lifetime fitness and health. Derby alone will not turn us into powerful lean machines – we have to put hard work in to get great results out of what we do every day. That daily hard work will show up on the track and in every other aspect of our lives.

Thank you for listening.

How a homeless pibble rescued me

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A few months ago, we added a member to the Pie pack & our lives changed forever. I talk about her constantly on Facebook, but I wanted to share her story with our family/friends who don’t spend every waking minute checking my updates. This is the story of Ginger, my snuggly little rescue girl.

I was leaving the skating rink after helping Assassination City run offseason tryouts, saying my goodbyes & trying not to cry (I’d retired from contact a few weeks earlier due to a spine injury & I was still pretty emotional about it). When I reached the parking lot, Salem was petting a dog who’d wandered up to her: a small female pit bull wearing an ill-fitting collar, no tags. She was emaciated, engorged with milk and covered in disturbingly symmetrical & deliberately placed wounds and scars of varying size all over her body and head. The burn between her beautiful butterscotch eyes (about the diameter of a cigar or car lighter) was almost more than I could bear to look at.

If asked what caliber of man my husband is, I can answer the question with the following exchange. I called Micah & said, “baby, we found a pit bull & I don’t know what to do. She looks like somebody’s been hurting her.” Without hesitation, he replied, “bring her home & we’ll take her to the vet in the morning.” I would’ve married him again on the spot.

Deathcake & I loaded the dog into my backseat, plying her with peanut butter provided by Castro. I spoke to her in a soft voice the whole way home, calming us both and gathering my strength as I rambled about her getting to meet my family. I had no idea how she and Duchess would react to each other. Duchess is a very friendly dog, but she’s spoiled, easily excitable and was a week away from having knee surgery. I didn’t want her to get too wild and I didn’t want our guest to feel threatened.

I needn’t have worried – this little dog was so shellshocked & timid that she barely reacted to Duchess. She ate two bowls of food, curled up on the couch close to me & fell promptly asleep. While she snoozed, I cruised rescue sites online, seeing hundreds of pitties in need of homes – no homes eagerly looking for abandoned/abused pibbles, though. I looked over @ her about two hours into our new adventure & told Micah, “her name is Ginger.” He just nodded in agreement and said, “yeah, it is.” We both knew she was ours pretty much the minute I brought her in the door.

The next morning, we took her to our vet, who confirmed that she had no microchip. I wouldn’t have returned her if there had been identification, though. Most of Ginger’s injuries were inflicted by a human. She had bites around her muzzle & on her hocks, but the majority of the wounds – scroll on past this bit if you are as sensitive to animal cruelty as I am – were burns, razor slashes & welts from a belt or cord. Her tail had been fractured near the base and had healed a bit crooked.

Our vet estimated that Ginger was around 2 years old, had been used as a bait dog based on the nature of her wounds (monsters who create fighting dogs hurt them to try to make them aggressive so they’ll attack each other) and was almost certainly dumped shortly after whelping a litter (seems to be common in this area – both dogfighting & dumping dogs right after they whelp). I still think about those puppies and worry about where they ended up.

Sweet Ginger was covered in fleas and hosting a bevy of parasites, including heartworms & roundworms. The next several months were spent treating our little hostess with the mostest for her various issues – we’re still waiting for the all-clear on the heartworms, but she’s past the hardest parts.

The several months were also spent working through her attachment issues, separation anxiety, housebreaking and general training. In the beginning, loud noises & sudden movements scared her. She watched us very closely to see if we’d hurt her, but she never hid from me or cringed away from my touch. She became my shadow, following me everywhere & snuggling in bed with me when I was laid up with migraines/neck pain. She fell in love with our kiddo & Duchess.

Her wounds have healed & her fur has almost completely grown back over the scars. She’s also about 30 pounds heavier & pretty darned content.

She still has moments of apprehension, particularly when she senses anger. I find myself saying, “it’s okay” to her and smiling a lot, which has a calming effect on both of us. In general, she has made me a calmer, more patient person.

I can’t help but feel that Ginger came into my life at exactly the right time. And I can’t get over the fact that she is exactly the kind of dog I would’ve chosen if I could have hand-picked her personality. It’s like we were meant for each other. It breaks my heart to speculate on what sort of hell she lived through before she found us, but I am so thankful for the opportunity to make the rest of her life as heavenly as I can.

Pinkify Your Hair – How to Keep Your Color Vibrant

One-Exercise Workouts: the Cross-Climber Burpee

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I’m a big fan of timesaving, full-body workouts that can be done virtually anywhere with no equipment. Seriously, there are ZERO excuses to skip a workout with that kind of resume. My favorites include core work, cardio and plyometrics to keep me in top form for derby and running.

I call this a One-Exercise Workout, but it’s really a couple of exercises blended together into one super ass-kicker. Push through these as hard and as fast as you can while maintaining your form – make sure you’re landing lightly and if you feel a sudden or sharp pain, stop immediately. These are not for the faint of heart, so be ready to ache afterward – but the results are absolutely worth the burn. Plus, as soon as you’re done with the set, you’re done with your workout – simple, huh?

Cross-Climber Burpee:

Start position: standing straight, legs together, arms by sides, shoulders back.

Drop to a crouch, hands on the floor slightly in front of your feet.

Jump feet back to land in plank position.

Holding your plank, pick up right leg and twist lower body to tap right knee against left elbow. Return to center and repeat on left side, tapping left knee to right elbow.

Return to plank (if you’re feeling particularly masochistic, you can throw in a push-up at this point) and hop legs back into a crouch.

From here, you’re going to spring up into the air! Jump up as high as you can…arms outstretched over your head if you have the ceiling room, or clasped behind your head if your Hobbit house was built in the 1950s like mine. Imagine your legs as springs, propelling you to the ceiling.

Land lightly in a crouch – that’s one rep! Shoot those legs back out into a plank and hit it again!

As for sets, play around with what works for your timeframe. When I’m rushed for time, I like to do mine Tabata-style – 20 seconds of 100% effort as I do as many as I can as quickly as possible, followed by 10 seconds of rest and repeated 8 times. That’s a 4 minute workout that hits every muscle while increasing my endurance, boosting my metabolism and making my butt look fantastic in shiny shorts. You can’t beat that with a bat.

Plyometrics and sock derby

Our rec league, Internal Affairs, accepts new skaters at the first 2 practices of every month. These intake practices usually focus on basic on-skates skills – stops, falls, crossovers and all of the other little details that make an athlete proficient on her skates.

The problem with this structure is that it takes some skaters several months to actually play the sport – and as anyone who’s played roller derby can attest, you spend your first year of contact figuring out what you’re doing besides just turning left and bouncing off of people. We spend so much time teaching people to pass their minimum skills assessments that we don’t always get to teach them actual gameplay ‘til much later.

Then there’s the fact that many new skaters haven’t built up their fast-twitch muscle fibers yet. Fast-twitch fiber is crucial for explosive, powerful movement, but it’s hard to develop those fibers on skates – your wheels don’t provide enough resistance with the ground to build the muscles you need to skate the way you want to.

So tonight, we did things a bit differently. I ran a full hour of cardio/endurance, plyometrics, agility, blocking/timing drills and scrimmage completely on foot. Then we geared up and rolled for real for the last 30 minutes.

My thoughts: it mostly went exactly as planned. I had to cut the skating time a bit because we spent so much time offskates (I originally promised only 30 minutes on foot), but we needed it. I watched lightbulbs come on over several heads as the stress of trying to figure out how to skate was removed and my girls could just concentrate on gameplay. Some of my freshest meat are the hardest hitters with the best timing when on foot! It was enlightening and I can’t wait to try it again.

Here is the workout in its entirety. Let me know if you have any questions or would like clarifications on any exercises or drills.

What you’ll need for this workout: a rink or other flat area to run across, preferably with a derby track already clearly marked; an agility ladder (if you don’t have one, you can use duct tape or chalk to make one on the floor/ground); shoes or socks you can run and hop in; jerseys and helmet covers.

Dynamic warm-up: neck/shoulder/arm circles, windmill toe touches, butt kicks, high knees, standing iron cross, inchworm/dogwalk series [toe touch, inchworm out to downward dog; alternate bending and straightening legs to stretch calves and hamstrings. Lift each leg and draw circles in both directions in the air before walking hands back in to toetouch, then slowly roll up, one vertebra at a time, ‘til you’re standing up straight].

Plyometrics and conditioning:

Side-step squats – step right and squat, back to neutral, then left and squat – repeat for 30 sec

Mohawk squats – legs wide, toes pointed out – down on a 2 count, up on 2 count for 30 sec

Crossover steps – (three lateral steps, then reverse direction by springing off outside foot) – start slowly, speed up – 30 sec

Speed skaters for 30 sec – mountain climbers for 30 sec

Agility ladder – one in, two in, two up one back, out in, ali shuffle (both sides)

Quick feet to burpee – jog down rink – quick feet to burpee – side shuffle back

Quick feet to burpee – skip down rink – quick feet to burpee – side shuffle opposite side back

WATER

Discussion and demonstration: legal blocking zones

Partner up for squat bumps – standing still, hip to hip – get low and pop up – 30 sec each side

Stagger partners so that one is behind and slightly to the side of the other – have partner in back step around partner in front, first gaining position, then using hip/booty to make contact – switch positions after a minute on each side

Blocking/timing drill: Snake line in center of track – person in back comes up outside and each person hipchecks them to outside – then hipcheck up inside – have them walking quickly with light feet (“scampering”)

Stop line – number off, grab jerseys and panties

Sock derby: 4-6 jams – play full 5 on 5, with penalties served by doing 10 push-ups, then rejoining pack – stop in between jams to answer questions, repeat rules, etc

WATER

Put on skates

Partner snake drill: skate in pairs through double line, focusing on matching speed and timing your cuts – use verbal communication and touch your partner’s hips or thighs to stay close.

Blocking/timing drill: single paceline on track – skater in back comes up outside and each skater in line hipchecks them to outside – then come up inside – do both sides twice. Focus on not cutting the track as a jammer and staying in-bounds as a blocker.

Truck and trailer demo: how to swing off your partner’s hips to block jammer

Partner up – practice swinging off each other’s hips, skating around derby track (choose a couple of jammers to dummy-jam through a few times, then pass the panties off to another pair)

Cooldown laps – opposite direction

Cooldown stretch

Pynk Fitness – wellness for the alternative athlete

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