Archives for May 2018

As a new skater, old ice rattled me. Every chink, every gouge, every line traced before me went through my legs like car tires over rumble strips. The sparser attendance at mid-day ice—another reason I sought it out when possible—meant I had more time before the wear and tear got to me. Once I felt the wobble, the teeth rattle in my head, I had to leave the ice, knowing I would come back when I could start over fresh.

I don’t know if other new skaters have had this same weird sensitivity. But it created an awareness in me of the changing nature of my new playing field. Of course, basketball courts get mopped after a sweaty fall and outdoor fields of all sorts are tended at regular intervals. But ice lived and breathed and changed throughout play in subtle and drastic ways.

After the Zamboni, the new ice is a clean slate, ready for whatever you can bring to it. You choose how you mark it, what history you carry to it, how you see it evolve before you. As the time moves forward, as the cuts add up, at a certain point they will be erased yet again: A chance to start cleanly each new period with only the score lingering, another fluctuation until it isn’t.

To my mind, no other game has this capacity for starting over entirely. The cuts, the marks, the blood all melt away. You do this because you love it, the beauty of it the first time leaving you breathless; now the exertion of it stealing through you, leaving behind the twins exhilaration and exhaustion. You do this because you can. Sometimes you do it for the process, sometimes for the win.

And if you forget why you do it, you need to remember those moments on the ice when it all felt right. You go back to that space and you decide that, yes, you do want this. The ice may be frozen in place, but you are not. You want it more than anything that could work against you. You decide. You believe. You make your mark in the now.

You got this, Caps.

 

Now that I had a stick and a bag of pucks, I needed my hockey skates to fully commit to my plan to play. Having sailed through three sessions of adult skating lessons in my figure skates, I knew that I would finally find my footing and fly in my hockey skates. My return to hockey skates would be a day of triumph, my first true hockey strides forward.

Except it wasn’t. Not even close. The second my hockey skates hit the ice, my body nearly did, too.  Whatever balancing and stopping I had managed in figure skates had now evaporated. It was as if the past three sessions had never happened; I was back to the perilous pratfalls of the previous October.

I felt no connection to the ice; my skates slipped around as if they had clear tape on their blades. As an avid toe-pick cheater, as I then discovered, I was toast without it. For pure self-preservation, I found myself clinging yet again to the boards, like the newbie I should no longer have been. In a last-ditch attempt to salvage some pride, I left my hockey skates behind at the rink for sharpening, a Hail Mary to ascribe my vanished prowess to equipment and not operator error.

I was now more relieved than ever that I had enlisted the help of a friend who grew up playing hockey and now lived near the rink. However, my transition would not be smooth, and I would not soon be learning the fancy stuff like t-stops that I had anticipated.

To his credit, he tried the t-stops anyway, ultimately dissuaded by the wild-eyed terror on my face and my Vincent Price-like cackle as I attempted them. He kept doing them, often flying away from me to get some actual exercise. T-stops and speed were as natural to him as breathing, despite the many years he had been off the ice.

He now spent his limited free time on Motocross, and he deconstructed its various aspects as we weaved around the rink. The details were welcome distractions from my frenzied mind, which was sputtering on an endless loop, “Why can’t I stop? Will I ever be able to stop? Oh, shit!”

And then I would fall.

After a few of these tumbles, he said, “You keep looking at the ice. You can’t do that.”

I knew that. I had sailed through three sessions, hadn’t I? But, I didn’t realize I was doing it. Too much focus on dying can be distracting.

“It’s just like Motocross. Wherever you look is where you go.”

And he showed me, shifting his view, his shoulders, his body, never looking at the ice, always looking at the next place he intended to be.

My attempts to follow his lead were by no means perfect, but they did change my mantra: “Wherever you look is where you go. Wherever you look is where you go. Wherever you look is where you go.”