I may be 45 years old now, but most of the time I try to ignore that fact. I’ve made avoiding having to growing up my life’s work. Hockey seems to have a way of reminding us of our physical age, though.
Our now regular Wednesday afternoon stick time date was in jeopardy this week due to our trip to SoCal this weekend. We couldn’t go a whole week without practicing, so we hit an evening stick time in Roseville last night. Not too crowded this time; there were 16 of us total. Six or so of them were teenagers that obviously play together; they took over one end of the ice. There were two other “pairs” and a handful of people working by themselves.
We concentrated on skating practice in the middle of the rink for the majority of the hour – crossovers, stopping, transitions and backwards. Some progress on crossovers; turning left felt like I was actually doing it, turning right I was feeling the edge and almost able to get the left foot crossing over (an improvement over Sunday night). I’m gaining confidence in my stops; was able to stop a few times without gliding to lose speed first.
To break up the skating practice, we did a few minutes of puckhandling and passing after 10-15 minutes of skating. I did a couple board to board runs with more speed than I’ve tried before and was pretty happy with my performance. We also tried a few passing runs to the goal, which is a lot of fun even if we do completely suck at it.
About 45 minutes in, we were working crossovers in the center circle when I caught an edge and went down. Ow. Pain in the groin… I didn’t even know I had a muscle there and now it wasn’t happy with me at all. Got up and skated to the bench to take a break. It only hurt when I tried to lift my leg, and I didn’t want to waste the remainder of our stick time sitting on the bench, so we went back out. I just didn’t skate as hard.
Ended the session by trying to take the puck away from each other. Fun!
We’ve decided to do stick times only in Vacaville in the future. It’s not the cost, it’s not the longer drive, it’s the people on the ice with us. It was very frustrating last night trying to work on skating drills in the center while 7 other people insisted on weaving right through us. We both got the impression that several of them felt that we were in their way (not the other way around). We’ve never felt that way in Vacaville.
Aleve is my best friend today. Whatever muscle I pulled is very unhappy with me and I have to go run errands. Yet another day when I’m glad the car has an automatic transmission; it’d be kind of hard to operate a clutch by lifting my left leg with my hand like I have to do while sitting on the couch. 😉
The pain… it sucks. But the fun I’m having learning to be a hockey player is worth it!
The Stanley Cup Playoffs begin tonight!!!
hockeyover40 