Hockey Cures All Ills

I saw my first hockey game, and everything changed.

Ice Skating

Next Stop

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It was summer 2014, and I could feel hockey decisions starting to loom. Did I continue with my informal training with various friends, old and new, or did I take a more serious step forward and find more formal training?

The benefits of training with friends are obvious: it only costs an entrance fee to a public skate or stick and puck; they support you thoroughly; you are not as concerned with looking foolish; and you can chat about non-hockey stuff as well.

On the flip side, they may not be as interested in or available for hockey as you are, and their support can lend a certain complacency. They are there to help and hang out—they are not arriving with a lesson plan or whistle. They may describe what worked for them or suggest areas for you to work on, but they are not setting up and running drills.

And, by this time, I had seen some of these drills. They generally confused the hell out of me and in doing so made me realize that it was getting to be put up or shut up time. Owning gear did not mean I was a player. I mean, I own a few guitars, and to adapt a quote from songwriter Tom T. Hall, “I started playing the guitar when I was 7 years old, and I’m just as good today as I was then.”  

In other words, I could very easily bail and chalk these past few months up to yet another interesting discipline that had no long-term traction with me. Buying the gear had committed me to nothing beyond a credit card payment.

But unlike my lifelong on-again, off-again relationship with music, hockey held no baggage for me—and by all rights, it should have had the most. (And, I don’t mean the biggest gear bag, which it definitely had.)

I never would have seen my first game if it had not been for someone I chose to never see or speak with again. That should have been enough to make me walk away from the game forever—people have walked away from long-term interests for far less.

And hockey never demanded less. Learning the sport required an investment in time and energy that rivaled anything else I had ever tried. It also caused a lot of pain—I was still staring at the bruise from a recent public skate figure skater collision as I was wondering about my next training steps.

Yet, I never doubted that there would be next training steps. For me, once I saw my first hockey game, it was never a question of if, but of when and how. Motivated purely by the game’s beauty, I had nothing to gain from its competitiveness. Sure, I wanted the Caps to win, but that’s a different thing and had nothing to do with me as a player. And, it wasn’t that I didn’t want to be and do better. I did.

As optimistic as I am, though, I am not blind. Watching the drills I didn’t understand made it very clear that I had a long way to go in my hockey journey. I understood nothing—and was only becoming vaguely aware of how much that nothing was.

That vague awareness, or truly ignorance, would work for me by giving me just what I needed to know when I needed to know it. There was no overthinking, just doing. Whenever I started to get confused, I found someone who had the answer. Whenever I wondered or worried about my next move, I got what I needed to make it happen, including the last spot in the hockey skills class at Kettler that was set to start at the end of June.

If you ever have a chance to be in this exact situation, to be so completely and thoroughly out of your element and understanding that you have nowhere to go or be than up and better, you must take it. You will never be so free. You will never be so protected. You will never be so awed by luck and beauty.

There’s a sentiment quoted in various ways that, “God helps three kinds of people: fools, children, and drunkards.” People who don’t understand the sport might put you in one or all of those categories when you take up hockey as an adult. Let them. It’s the very best place to be.

Flying and Stopping

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In the summer, a glorious thing happens for the new skater who is no longer laboring under any illusions about the length and sharpness of her hockey learning curve: ice time opens up. Although I had expected some difficulty at my first stick and puck, I had been stunned by my instantly evaporating skating skills when faced with gear and stick. From that reality jolt I saw a very long list of skills I did not have, most of which I had no correct terminology to describe: that puck thing, that dance stop thing, that stick push thing.

But I could describe one thing: my skating was slow and tentative, featuring lots of sliding around and falling down instead of intentional or controlled stops, my presence a mixture of furrowed brow, terrified exclamation, and maniacal laughter. I would laugh even harder when others sprayed ice with their skates and suggested I could do the same. Generally, I looked over my shoulder to make sure they were talking to me. They clearly had me confused with someone who had a clue and some ability. I knew I needed to be better, and I knew someone who could help.

My regular skating partner Motocross also sought more summer ice time, but for very different reasons. Having been on skates most of his life, usually and preferably as a goalie, he had a current goal more to do with burning off energy than with mastering mysterious basics. At those early morning public skates, we cut an odd ice partnership—his effortlessness, my clumsiness; his detailed explanations, my flustered questions; his fluid executions, my tortured imitations.

Every so often he had to tear away from me to fly at an appropriate speed. I couldn’t fault him and loved to watch him, his smoothness as inspiring as it was baffling, no misplaced edge, no unnecessary effort, no obvious calculation. His conversation with the ice was deep and longstanding; mine was a shallow cocktail party chat punctuated by bickering.

I learned something every time we skated together, and today would be no different. I told him all about the thrill of victory and the agony of defeat from my first stick and puck, and he showed me things to practice based on what I said and what he saw. Our conversation that day centered on stopping, as it usually did. His advice and demonstration were always helpful and clear, even if my ability to capitalize on his expertise might have made him think otherwise. I found out “that dance stop thing” is known as a t-stop; that was the only thing I figured out about it that day.

Skaters speeding into various jumps dominated center ice; Motocross and I mingled in the next informal ring with those who had clear goals and some ability to achieve them; and the newest and most terrified clung to the boards and, much to my relief, flailed more than I did.

We were continuing to discuss the t-stop when suddenly Motocross yelled, “Look out!” and zipped forward. I turned and saw her back racing toward me. Possessing no zip, I tried to dig my skates in and brace myself for impact. It was a bad idea because you can’t really brace when you can’t really stop.

But, oh yes, I did stop—after I flew through the air. Several concerned citizens helped me upright, and I saw the skate guard sternly talking to the distracted diva and accidental instigator. She apologized, I was okay, no real harm and no intentional foul. (Note to newbies: I have never been flattened by a hockey skater or a child at a public skate, but I have been clobbered twice, and only twice, by distracted backward-flying figure skaters.)

Motocross is a hockey player, so after he made sure I was okay, he did not mince words. “You did that all wrong back there.”

I know I glared. I was bruised in body and pride from being bested in an unprovoked attack by a figure skater. I was the victim here. What the heck kind of pep talk was this?

“What do you mean?”

“Look,” he softened a bit. “I know you weren’t fast enough to get past her. But, in case this ever happens again, don’t just prepare yourself to take it.”

My brow remained furrowed.

He continued, “She was in the wrong, and you just let her take you out. Trust me, if she had come at me, I would not have been the one who went flying. You have to send that energy coming at you back to her. Don’t just take it.”

He was right. In so many ways. You can always count on a goalie, who surveys the entire expanse of ice, to see the bigger picture.
 

 

 

That’s Hockey

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Athletes often are advised to visualize what they plan to do. This visualization is deliberate, an exercise, a means of controlling the narrative and outcome. I have benefited from this work, but I wonder how much more deeply I have grown from those stories I could not control, the ones that came to me in dreams or in unexpected scenarios—as hockey often did.

After a long night of watching the NHL Channel or a local Caps game, my dreams were glorious. Backstrom passed to Ovi over and over, Chimera flew, Holtby stalked the crease. Capitals, opponents, all shifted smoothly, swiftly, endlessly, their skating winding round my sleeping mind and soul. I thought of these dreams when I practiced my skating.

Sometimes, my hockey dreams were amusing mash-ups of other interests and loves. In one of my favorites, I am at a party. I am ready to go home. Frank Sinatra is at this party, and he volunteers to drive me. I look at him askance until I find out he also is a hockey fan. Then I say, “Sure.”

We spend the rest of the night sitting around my dining room table drinking bourbon and arguing about the only sport that matters. Who knew the chairman of the board liked hockey and Jefferson’s Reserve? I sure didn’t. We didn’t talk about music once, and we didn’t do anything else. (Even in dreams I have zero romantic interest in men with messy personal lives, but I do love to listen to their stories about their man-made disasters.)

Oddly, I dreamt easily of all things hockey, but not yet of myself playing it—perhaps because at that point I had not. I had used my stick off ice to work on passing and stickhandling, and I had skated at several rinks, doing my best to maneuver the baffling angles of the skates required by my new sport.

To finally combine those elements, I had bought the equipment necessary to put it all together at a very early morning stick ‘n’ puck at Cabin John Ice Rink. I had set my alarm for 5 a.m., slept very little, and was like a child again, ready for my birthday, staring at the ceiling in wonder and anticipation. I had tried all my gear on twice and so could mimic mastery, as long as nobody asked me questions about anything. And, I figured those nuts enough to get up that early on a lovely May day would be more concerned about themselves than my gear.

It turns out a handful of people had similar ideas, and when I went to the women’s locker room—they had one for women!—I noticed another bag in the room and realized I wouldn’t be the only woman on the ice, which was a comforting thought. I also was relieved to have the room to myself to unravel the gear post-dress rehearsal. It took me 20 minutes to put it on and then some to go over it all to guard against anything loose or upside-down. I blame most of the delay on the wrestling match I had with the sock tape. I narrowly prevailed.

I waddled out of the locker room. The door to the rink normally open for public skate was closed. I was confused about how to get on the ice but saw another person enter from an area with benches I had never noticed before. It was not nearby, so I had to waddle all around the rink, relieved that everyone already on the ice appeared too consumed with pucks to notice the newbie. I took my first tentative steps onto the ice, stick in hand, helmet awkwardly on head, gear so lightweight yet cumbersome. I couldn’t see much through the cage, and my peripheral vision felt blocked by the helmet.

I felt like a turtle in a tunnel. As I scooted tentatively across the ice, attempting to hold my stick as the Iceman had shown me, wondering how to balance in these skates and this featherweight exoskeleton, I found myself near a puck. I had been watching the four other people zipping around, shooting at a goalie in one of the nets, handling the puck all around the ice. I looked at them, I looked at the puck, and I replicated what I had worked on with the tennis ball on the floor in my living room until the cat got too involved in my practice sessions.

But here on the ice, my feet almost gave way from the force of my stick against the ice on its way to a seemingly stuck puck—heavy compared to the tennis ball, with no real give or bounce, unlike anything in my previous sport experience. It dawned on me that I had never actually taken stick to puck before, and I was astonished that my off-ice practice had no relevance whatsoever. I might as well have been hitting Twinkies with a fishing net for as much good as that tennis ball practice was doing me now.

As I struggled to get my stick somewhat back in my control and my feet firmly balanced, I decided to ignore the pucks for a bit and glide around holding the stick, trying to get the feel of the gear, the stick, the skates, the ice. Nothing felt right, but falling did feel amazing. Skating sans gear in figure or hockey skates had left me covered in bruises. I gave my hockey gear mad props for its unexpected no-bruise blessing, especially given I would be falling a lot more now that my balance was thoroughly confounded by the equipment and the stick/puck relationship. It was as if I had never been on the ice before for any reason.

And the skating. How did it get worse? How did I get slower—how was it even possible to be any slower? If I could see myself on the ice, would I appear stationary despite my earnest exertions? The gear wasn’t heavy, but it was awkward for someone whose previous sports had required at most a special hat or shoes—never body armor. Suffice it to say, my dreams and visualizations of how this would go had nothing to do with my reality.

That morning at Cabin John, as the full realization of the difficulty of what I was trying to do hit me, I heard the words of an older Sinatra, the one who had been through it and had come out the other side, the one not much older than I was then, and I found a way to smile. I am a late convert to his music. As a youngster, I didn’t like his smug demeanor, and as a lifelong Elvis fan, I didn’t take kindly to his dissing the King. But not long before I discovered hockey, I, too, had taken “the blows,” and his music had begun to resonate with me. “That’s Life” became and remains a regular cover in one of my musical projects.

“I’ve been up and down and over and out, and I know one thing/Each time I find myself laying flat on my face, I just pick myself up and get back in the race.” I knew that one thing, too, as well as another—as disappointed as I was on that day at the gulf between my dreams and my reality, I was going to love every exasperating minute of making them match.

And, I started to do so right away. Always an optimist, I also know how to turn disappointment into achievement. As I wrote to the woman who had helped me buy the gear: “I made it to a stick and puck last week, and I did not die or kill anyone else. So, a complete success, in my mind. Can’t wait to get to another.”

“But I don’t let it, let it get me down/‘cause this fine old world, it keeps spinning around.”

Gearing Up

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Ah, the non-hockey smell of brand new gear (even the pre-owned skates were oddly innocuous).

Had I known hockey involved garters, I would have signed up years ago, if only for the beautiful incongruity of all those sharp edges and armor-like accoutrements offset by a throw-back item more likely to evoke a hitchhiking Claudette Colbert than Ranger great Rod Gilbert. But these bland, utilitarian hockey garters are needed to hold up your socks, which go over your shin pads. The alternative is a newer Velcro socks/shorts combination, a disappointing choice made by a distressing number of people. Honestly, where is the fun in that? I intended to fully embrace this exceedingly amusing contradiction, especially as garters were the only things besides the gloves and skates that I had tried on before.

Oh, there were so many things to figure out on that Saturday in the Rockville Total Hockey. Because I had help, it was way less stressful and far more successful than my previous gear near-meltdown. Within an hour or two, I had everything I needed in the right size and configuration:

  • Skates
  • Socks for skates (not everybody uses these—the choice is yours)
  • Shin pads
  • Hockey socks
  • Sock tape
  • Hockey garters
  • Hockey pants
  • Shoulder pads
  • Elbow pads
  • Jersey
  • Helmet
  • Mouthguard
  • Gloves

Amazingly enough, I even knew how to put it all on. Whether I would remember how to do so when I went to the rink at some vague point in the future was another question for another day.

On this day, I had answers for gear success:

  1. Ask around before you buy. You can get a sense of what will work best for you by asking other players what they prefer and why. Even people using hand-me-down gear can tell you if they like it or not. These insights are super helpful. Also, other players may have gear they are willing to give away or sell that is brand new or slightly used. I got my hockey pants that way—brand new with tags.
  2. Figure out how much and which borrowed/used gear you are willing to use. Especially if you are not sure you will stick with hockey, you may want to borrow gear or buy it used. If you are a germaphobe, you may want to buy it all new anyway. Keep in mind that “used” sometimes is brand new because someone figured out quickly it would not work but held onto it for whatever reason. Again, asking other players is the best source for this because you may find gear from them or they may suggest rinks, programs, or stores that offer used items.
  3. Take a friend with you who knows about hockey gear. This may seem obvious, but I know many people who just went on their own to buy gear the first time and ended up with items that did not work for them. That is the chance you take with any new endeavor when you don’t know exactly what you want because you have never used any of the equipment before. Having a female hockey player accompany me to the store stopped me from making several bad decisions because she knew the right questions to ask of me and of the staff. I cannot emphasize enough how much she saved the day.
  4. Try it all on again before going to the rink. If you are going to an early morning stick ‘n’ puck, you may be the only one in the women’s locker room and have no one to ask if you are confused. Or, you may be like me and not want to ask anyway because you don’t want to look like as much of an idiot off the ice as you know you will look once you are out there. Putting on gear becomes second nature, but at first, it can be confusing as anything. Most hockey players are super friendly and happy to help with gear questions. But, if you are the sort of person who worries about the one grouchy jerk who exists to make others feel stupid, then try it all on again at home before you try it at the rink.
  5. Figure out what to wear under the gear. I knew about this thanks to the female hockey player who went with me to the store. It never even occurred to me that this might matter, but I found a shirt cut for women that I loved that also helped my elbow pads stay in place. I decided to wear the leggings I wore for ice skating with this shirt, and voila! I could walk into any rink with any changing situation with no worries. All I had to do was put my gear over the shirt and the leggings and I was good to go, and the reverse worked perfectly, albeit with lots more sweat, afterward. Whether a rink had a co-ed locker room, no changing area, or a women’s bathroom, I was ready to arrive and depart in a way that was comfortable for me. Changing areas vary wildly by rink, and it is good to be prepared for any possibility. I mean, there are garters involved here—if you’re doing it the right way.

Weightless

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This post was not supposed to happen now. But, events in real-time must interrupt the previously scheduled, a bit of a Princess Bride moment, as you wish. I must be that inquisitive child, because only then can the heart of this story come through.

Once upon a time a woman no longer young, recently wronged by a wicked prince, had looked at ice as if for the first time and found that it was magic. It asked of her the impossible, and if she didn’t exactly perform its requests perfectly, she did them joyfully and consistently. And her heart grew strong in each new challenge the ice asked of her.

But challenges not of the ice started shouting, and they asked darker questions. When she answered, she also did her best, but their magic drained her. To withstand these darker demands, she shut down her strong heart, without even knowing it. There was too much to lose if she let herself feel the pain, but she only knew this later.

What she did know, what she did see, was that the ice had lost its magic. She stopped listening to its call for longer than she realized–days, weeks, months, 2015 almost through 2016. Her skates stayed covered, her stick feigned furniture in a corner, a talisman rendered mute and useless.

As is often the case with magic and joy, she only began to understand what the ice required after she had fled the darkness to a place no longer haunted, one not cased by wolves. Instead of screeches from buses and feral neighborhood children, she heard conversational geese and saw once again her constant childhood companion, the redwing blackbird. The deep darkness in this refuge overlooking water brought her every star, every night she ventured out her door.

Childlike, with an open heart in the protection of this star-canopied home, she heard the ice call to her again. And as she answered, her heart fully open, she knew that she could do anything it asked. And she did. Despite the mountain of boxes, the skates, her stick, were never fully packed away. She found a rink nearby and resumed the conversation.

As she moved forward, it wasn’t that she didn’t get bogged down in the darkness of others, especially people she cared about. She did. But, when that weight shifted toward her, she now pushed it back. She chose to keep her heart open, a decision requiring determination in an age weighted by distraction, comparison, and everyone else’s expectations and opinions on every single thing a person might ever consider doing.

And she is not the only one. Amazing things happen when you choose to play to win, instead of defaulting to play not to lose. You can set a city on fire with your heart, dance in fountains, win over the suspicious and jaded.

How many times can you hoist the Stanley Cup over your head? Ovi certainly makes those 35 pound-overhead presses look easy. Joy is weightless, apparently. And contagious. The one with the open heart wins. Choose to make your own joy, pass that along. Everyone wins.

The Beginning

Ice Timing

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Few things terrified me more as a new figure skater than going to a busy public skate, where I would be elbow to elbow with skaters of all levels. Perhaps this unease had to do with my previous boss telling me about the last public skate she had attended, when her kids were young, where another child had dropped in front of her, causing her to fall in a way that broke her wrist instead of the child.

Or maybe it had to do with my continuing inability to stop and my need to remain as close as possible to the wall, which I could, with terror in my eyes and flailing, outstretched arms, use as a sort of bumper-car fail-safe in a public skate emergency.

Such emergencies generally involved the below skater categories:

  1. Other new skaters, who, like myself, had no idea how to stop and would grab onto me as I was grabbing onto the wall (boards, really, but I did not call them that yet). I could sympathize, but did my best to avoid them anyway lest their tragedy suddenly become mine as well.
  2. Small children, whether new or experienced, because they had no sense of potential injury, and their falls resembled a brief, mostly ignored bounce onto the ice. I admired and feared them.
  3. Hockey players, especially the younger ones, who would chase each other or an imagined nemesis, dodging every obstacle (i.e., me and every other skater out there) with such last-minute precision that my heart jumped in my throat each time I saw or felt how close they had come. I was convinced they did this to terrorize us all. As with the indestructible children, I admired and feared them, too.

Because of these dangers, I became a master at finding empty ice. One of my best friends lived across the street from a restaurant that turned its patio garden into a winter rink. Skating there any weeknight meant lots of space and one low price for hours, and you could find me there most nights.

If I could slip away during lunch, I would go to Cabin John, which happened to be 10 minutes from my new job. As the Olympic season ended and my Kettler lessons wound down, I generally went there because their adult-only day skates eliminated the second and most third skater emergencies. With 10 skaters or less at most Cabin John sessions, the first emergency diminished as well because I had more room to focus and fall and avoid others when doing both.

As I found a corner of my own and worked on spins, I would watch anyone in hockey skates out of the corner of my eye and marvel at their speed, fluidity, and ice-spraying stops. My stops still involved vigorous toe-pick cheating, if I were lucky. Imagining myself in hockey skates was starting to feel like imagining myself in an astronaut’s suit.

And so I spun. My doubts and hopes wrestling in my mind and heart, I sought the equilibrium available to me in the moment. I would spin to the left, then I would spin to the right, ignoring the conventional skating wisdom that I should choose a stronger side and focus there. Many years of pilates had taught me another way, one that sought to balance strength and weakness, that would ensure I could spin both ways with equal grace and flexibility as my mind spun everyway for answers it could not yet have.