For those of you who don’t know me and/or haven’t read any of the older blogs, here’s an update. I was a suicidally depressed engineering student when my wife announced she was joining roller derby. I graduated about the same time she and our daughters became involved in the roller derby community, and I started roller-skating in order to spend more time with them. I learned lots of jam skating and fell in love with roller skates in general. Then I drove past a skatepark and thought: “I wonder if people could do that on roller-skates.”
Turns out, you can.

My last blog update Done Got Religion, was all about skating in skateparks. I talked about how the dynamics involved in skating parks — the linear momentum becoming rotational momentum, the back and forth between kinetic and potential energy — made me feel closer to Mother Earth, my fellow humans, and the kinematic truth of the universe itself. It was some next-level hippie shit that I would normally consider too corny to say aloud, nevertheless put into print, if not for the fact that it’s totally true. I am a roller skate zealot.
That being said, it seems odd that it took me so long to warm to the idea of playing roller derby. After all, I was already a fan of the sport before I started skating. I loved the action and the theatricality of the bouts I’d seen. A friend of mine once described a woman’s roller derby bout as: “Nascar in a strip club: a bunch of hot chicks and left turns.” I don’t even like Nascar, and the description appeals to me.
So why did I resist playing for so long?
Mostly, I blame the enforced sports of public school. I was one of those kids who got picked last whenever the class had to divvy up into teams. I wasn’t slow or weak or uncoordinated. I was just a spastic geek who didn’t understand the rules to anything. Playing any team sport left me feeling like a foolish and inadequate outsider. So, while I loved watching roller derby, I loathed the idea of playing it myself.
I was also concerned about embarrassing my wife. As I mentioned in Happy Mamaskatrixx Day, my wife decided to join roller derby a few weeks after tryouts for that year had finished. As a consequence, she was unable to be on the official “fresh meat” team. One of the many solutions she found to that problem was to train with the local men’s team, called Lane County Concussion. She did this for several months, even bench coaching for them a few times. By the time she was finally accepted to the women’s fresh meat team, she’d already become Mamaskatrixx, a well-known satellite of the roller derby community.
I, on the other hand, showed up for my first day of derby immediately after spending five years with my head buried in various textbooks. Since giving up drinking fifteen years earlier, I’d reverted to the same spastic geek I’d been in public school, only now, I was also out of shape and cripplingly shy.
As I walked into the sports center where our derby league practices, all my old fears and insecurities resurfaced. The huge indoor area was buzzing with more than a hundred skaters. People yelled instructions to their teammates over the background roar of nearly a thousand rolling wheels, and the whole place smelled like sweat and dirty skate gear.
I could not have felt more out of place.
The only guy on Lane County Concussions I knew was Speed Dealer Jeff. He and I had done some jam skating together at the local skating rink, and he taught me how to skate in a skatepark, so I considered him a friend. I’d talked to some of the other guys, but I didn’t really know them.
They knew my wife, however. Most of them had skated with her. They knew she was a strong and disciplined skater who could take a hit and give one back. I, on the other hand, had no discipline whatsoever, got winded on a single flight of stairs, and was terrified of skating anywhere near another person. My son used to take advantage of this fact at our local roller rink, inching ever closer to me as we skated until I ran into the wall. My eldest daughter tried to help me by making me hold her hand as we skated, but I always had to break it off after a couple sweaty, nerve-wracking laps.
So when my wife asked me to try skating with the men’s derby team for two months, I agreed. I figured it would help me get over my fear of skating near people, as well as give me more cardio for my jam and skatepark skating. Also, Jeff had asked me to try it out, and the guy had pretty much taught me how to skate, so my skates and I owed him at least an honest effort.
“You ready?” he asked me as I geared up on that first day.
“No.”
“Don’t worry. You’re going to do great.”
Then someone yelled: “Paceline,” and I proved him very wrong.
As the name would suggest, a paceline is a line of skaters, all going at the same pace. Considering the awful state of my cardio, that would have been bad enough in itself, but in a derby paceline, everyone needs to stay within touching distance of the person in front of them. Within two laps, the pace and proximity to other skaters had me sweating and panting.
Someone yelled: “sprint-weave,” and things got much, much worse.
In a sprint-weave, the skater at the end of the paceline has to sprint up to the front, then keep sprinting around the whole track until they catch up with the paceline again, and then weave through it until they get to the front. Then the next guy goes.
I was having trouble just keeping up with the paceline. The idea of lapping it seemed ridiculous, and just the thought of weaving in and out of the tiny spaces between skaters nearly made me panic and fall. Every time one of the other skaters cut in front or behind me, I flinched.
When my turn came, I gamely sprinted out in front, but could not catch back up to the back of the paceline until someone yelled “Pull!” and the whole team slowed down. By the time I started weaving through the paceline, my legs were exhausted. Where the other guys on the team had jumped gracefully through the spaces in the line, I slowly and awkwardly drifted between skaters, breaking up everyone’s flow and forcing myself to sprint to catch up again and again. By the time I made it to the front of the paceline, my ears were ringing, my face tingling, and I was trying to spot a trashcan where I could puke.
But the practice kept going, and going, and going.
Eventually, I had to leave the paceline and skate around the outside of the track, where I wouldn’t be in anyone’s way. I was mildly proud of myself for making it all the way to the water break before vomiting in the trashcan, but other than that, I felt pretty bad about the first hour of practice, and I seriously doubted my ability to make it through the second hour. Had I not been worried about embarrassing my wife, I’d have taken off my gear and gone home. Instead, I drank more water, puked again, and rolled out for my next hour.
In the second hour, we worked on scrimmage drills. Having never played derby, I was completely lost. I couldn’t bring myself to ask for help because I was afraid I’d already made myself look like an idiot during warmups. I just wanted to attract as little attention as possible until the end of practice, and go home. Every time I had to sneak off to vomit, I felt like people were judging me.
But then something weird happened near the end of practice. A couple of our scrimmage drills started to resemble actual game play. I stopped making trips to vomit water into the trashcan, and I found myself skating very close to people without worrying about falling and dragging them down. One of the better players used me as a battering ram to smash his way through the pack, and — after the terror induced paralysis had passed — it made me feel at least somewhat useful. Afterwards, everyone told me they wanted me to come back, which felt nice, though not nice enough for me to actually want to return.
I doubted my ability, but mostly, I didn’t feel like I belonged. At the time, I thought the only way to get better in derby was to relentlessly drill a small set of skills to near-perfection, spending thousands of hours honing the basics like crossovers and hip checks and plow stops. In jam or vert skating, on the other hand, I was able to keep progressing simply by expanding my skill set and learning trick after trick without ever really mastering any of them. Also, jam and vert skating could be practiced in solitude, while roller derby required me to interact with people.
And it came down to attitude, too. These people were athletes. I was more of an artist. They were disciplined. I was creative. We just didn’t seem to have that much in common. Secretly, I planned on fulfilling my two-month obligation to my wife, recruiting a few of the guys to skate the skateparks with me, and quitting.
For the first two months I trained with the Lane County Concussions, we didn’t have a single practice with full attendance. The practices usually consisted of four or five guys, and a couple drop-in skaters from the female league. During the summer, we ditched one of our weekly practices entirely and replaced it with an outdoor skate along our city’s bike trails. The trail skates were also sparsely attended and, for me at least, were long and embarrassing ordeals where everyone on the team, and often their girlfriends, took off skating and left me to trudge along the trails alone. The fact that they periodically stopped skating to wait for me only made me feel worse.
I reached the end of my two months and told my wife I wanted to quit. Roller derby took too much time, it was too hard, and I hadn’t learned to like it. I just wanted to skate in the skatepark near my house and jam skate in my kitchen. She pointed out that, due to the fact that my team had dropped our Thursday practices, I hadn’t actually gone to two full months of practice, and that I should give it a couple more weeks. I agreed.
One and a half weeks later, I got a late night call from my wife. She was crying. She said her skate broke at practice, and she needed to go to the hospital. I jumped in the car and made it across town just in time to learn that she had likely snapped the ACL tendon in her right knee. Just four days from playing in her first official bout, the culmination of eighteen months hard work, and it was snatched from her because of a fucking equipment malfunction.
I really can’t express how cosmically unfair this injury was and is. My wife worked hard to become the best derby player she could become, while I bitched and complained about derby being too hard. She ate right, cross trained, and didn’t take unnecessary risks, while I stuffed myself with junk food, skipped out on extra training, and risked my life in skateparks whenever I could. If anyone should have gotten hurt, statistically speaking, it should have been me.
God, I wish it had been.
I’m not going further into this part of the story, because living through it once sucked bad enough. Just about the only spark of happiness that entered our home was when my wife watched my daughters and me play or practice roller derby.
Unfortunately, I didn’t want to do derby anymore. I’d never gotten any better at it, and though a couple guys had made an effort to get to know me, most of the men on the team were still strangers. Also, the men’s team was getting ready to scrimmage against the local women’s travel team, The Skatesaphrenics. This is a team composed of some of the best women derby players from all the local teams, and I really hated the idea of playing against them. To be fair, however, I still hated the idea of playing against anyone.
But I couldn’t bring myself to tell my wife I wanted to quit. Her face lit up whenever I told her about practice. On the day of my first scrimmage I came home from hanging Christmas lights and doing other odd jobs, only to discover that my nearly crippled wife had already packed my derby bag for me.
“Do you want to try my wheels tonight?” she asked. “I never really got the chance to break them in.”
It seemed like a pretty big responsibility, being in charge of someone else’s happiness. Especially when I didn’t feel like I was any good at derby. I was certain I was only going to let her down.
And then I realized something wonderful. My wife had never played roller derby before getting injured. She’d trained a lot, sure, but she’d never actually played in a bout. Every night she sat on the sidelines watching people play, the muscles in her legs twitching sympathetically, not because she thought she was going to be the world’s best roller derby player, but because she just wanted the chance to try.
And I could do that, at least.
“Keep the wheels,” I told her. “But I’d like to borrow your jersey.”
So I put on my wife’s jersey, the one she used when coaching the men’s team, and became Mamaskatrixx. I put aside my own fears and tried to channel her strength and excitement. I went to my first scrimmage, and I wasn’t afraid, because Mama would not have been afraid. I was excited, because Mama was excited.
It would be great if, at this point in the story, I went to my first scrimmage and kicked ass, but that’s not what happened. As a matter of fact, I definitely hindered my team more than I helped it that first time. But I did it. I played against other people. And if I could scrimmage, I could bout. And if I could bout, it meant Mama could bout too.
So, I let my team know that I was considering quitting, but that I intended to stay until after I’d participated in at least one real bout. Regardless of whatever else happened, I wanted my wife to watch me roll out in front of a cheering crowd with Mamasktrixx on my back. Because she’s a tough chick, and I don’t get the chance to carry her often.
