Hockey Cures All Ills

I saw my first hockey game, and everything changed.

Archives for October 2017

Anything Worth Doing Is Worth Doing Badly    

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In general, my willingness to be publicly humiliated is extremely limited. That doesn’t mean it doesn’t happen. And somewhat routinely. If there is coffee or beer to be spilled, I will find a way. Sudden pratfalls are another specialty. And, I excel at tripping both up and down stairs.

But when it comes to hockey, I am choosing humiliation—not just managing accidents—and my capacity for it seems unlimited—especially when it comes to learning to skate. Walk into any adult learn-to-skate class, and you will understand vividly what I mean.

Some Saturday mornings the classes were beyond perilous for the eight of us who looked and presumably felt like small horses do when they first try to stand up on their newborn legs. It didn’t help any of us to see the little ones taking classes nearby flying by at invincible speeds directly correlated to their lower vertical proximity to the ice.

Because of the anti-hockey-skate-talking-to I got from my teacher, I switched to a strange hybrid skate reinforced for use on cold ponds. They felt better balance-wise than the hockey skates I had tried before—it seemed I needed a flatter edge to get a sense of things. As the session wound down, my balance got better, and although my ability to stop was beyond miserable, other pieces of the skating puzzle slowly made more and more sense. Swizzles ruled, the concept of an inside and outside edge began to take shape in mind and muscle, and crossovers still terrified but also intrigued.

As the class progressed and we moved from swizzles to single-foot edge work, I began to question the wisdom of the new pond skates. At 70 bucks, they were a reasonable deal, but it was becoming clear that they weren’t truly figure skates, and they weren’t truly hockey skates. They worked great to help me get my initial footing. And I had come to believe my teacher’s assessment that for whatever reason I was better in figure skates.

Knowing that whatever chance I had to play hockey down the line rested on my ability now to get some understanding on and with the ice, I had a decision to make at the end of the session: Did I go back to my impossible hockey skates or commit to something that could take me farther from my goal now to get me back to it in a better way later? The circles kept getting bigger as did the figures in my dreams.

Trust Your Edges

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The more you learn about skating, and the more you talk to those who know a lot about it, you will hear: Trust your edges.

To anyone unfamiliar with skates and the best way to use them, this will make no sense. Aren’t you balancing on a flat metal blade? Is the edge that sharp star-like thing on the front of the skate? (FYI, that is called the toe pick, which is only found on figure skates. Hockey skates are angled, pretty much the opposite of flat, and do not have a toe pick—I didn’t know they were different, either, at first.) There is a lot more going on with that skate and the person controlling it than is immediately obvious. Anyone who makes skating look easy is using the edges.

Hockey and ice skate blades have edges on either side of the thin flatter middle. The edge on the big-toe side of each skate is known as the inside edge. The edge on the pinkie toe side is the outside edge. Skaters who really know what they are doing, who just effortlessly fly around, know the best edge to use at any given time and even can emphasize the front or back of these edges to suit their needs. Any beginning skater will start to feel (or, in my case, almost never feel) the edges when working on stopping. You cannot stop if you stay on the flat middle of the skate blade. You need to work the angle, to find the edge, if you want control.

When a skater first hits the ice, if that skater truly knows the score, she is testing those edges, getting a feel for them on this day at this particular time. Does one seem stronger than another? Has one dulled enough to require attention? Can she find the best balance among them? When she tests them, do the edges hold?

As a skater, your body and, by extension, your edges are different every day. It doesn’t take long to see where the vulnerabilities lie. As you get stronger on the ice, your edges tell you more about where you stand, about what you need to do to find the most balance, about the little mistakes that may drag you down.

Edges come into play with everything. Whether you call them boundaries, standards, or bullshit detectors, you must learn to trust your edges off the ice, too. Your edges keep you straight, allow you to react quickly, help you get to where you need to go next. They keep you focused and aware. And once you have learned to feel what they are telling you, they give you the balance and the means to meet whatever you encounter with some measure of strength and grace.