New Skating RInk: Awesome!

[unicornduke]

My right hip: less awesome! 

So I went to this place because it's the only rink I could find with weekday evening public skate and it turns out that it's an outdoor rink with a roof! I've never been to one before! It was colder than a normal rink because there was a bit of a breeze but not bad at all.

And it was not busy at all. 

The busiest the rink got was like 7 people and that was including the staff of teenage hockey boys on the ice. At more than one point, I was the only person on the ice. 

It was awesome. 

I did better at my left crossovers and after I'd been alone on the ice a little bit, I decided to change direction (sidenote, why do rinks only go counter clockwise????) and after about five minutes my right hip cramped up, which I wasn't expecting at all. I'd been having issues with my right skate skidding and couldn't figure out if it was the skate or if it was how I was skating, my right hip wasn't doing that at all. I suspect it's my hip, not doing the pushoff correctly because of a lack of developed muscle. Crossovers were done but not great because I had no flexibility in that hip. 

I skated with long johns on and I don't think it made a difference. I also need to pick up some thin gloves because I don't have any. 

I'm definitely going to go back, with so few people, I can work in the other direction to build those muscles up. 

Two weeks until lessons! 

Comments

[graydon]

Yay, skating!

Rinks only go counter-clockwise because most people are right-side dominant and want their right leg on the outside of turns. It takes active determination to get lots of people to go the other way.

Staying warm after you skate is often trickier than staying warm enough while skating; the "I'm cold now, aiee" muscle consequences are no fun. (Same with electrolyte crashes; just because you're doing it in the cold doesn't mean you can't get a potassium crash.)

Warm thin gloves are lamentably pricy, even now.

[unicornduke]

well that's a silly thing for rinks to do but I guess most people are just there for fun stuff. I'm going to work double on going the other direction because it would definitely help.

I do turn up the heat when I get back in the truck but I also need to remember to bring a blanket for my lap.

I actually skated with my coat on while I warmed up and then I started getting too warm so I ditched it for my normal long sleeve compression shirt- t-shirt- hoodie combo, which was surprisingly good despite the breeze in the rink.

I would even take non warm thin gloves because I've been wearing nothing on my hands. I don't like wearing my thick winter gloves so I need to pick some up. My hands actually stay pretty warm if I pull my hoodie sleeves down a little.

[dragonlady7]

I always wondered about rinks' prevailing direction as well, but I guess runners always go one way on a track, and speed skate races always go one direction, so. Roller derby is all also done one direction, but our practices always, always, always included a lot of opposite-direction work because we'd wind up with such huge repetitive-strain issues from unidirectional work-- for years I wore thigh-high socks at two different heights because of the difference in size of my thighs, though I think that after five years it's finally gone away. My calves were different sizes too but not as noticeably. Where it really got me was my back muscles-- nothing visible, but my lower back was extremely uneven for a while and I wound up with a lot of pain trying to fix it. (And I tore a muscle, at one point, so. Don't do that. Don't recommend it.)

A big thing that can help too is to skate backwards. If you master forward-backward transitions, and wind up stuck at a skate session where they won't reverse direction, you can work on backwards skating for a while and it strains your back the other way, at least.

(The other thing is to do off-skates work to strengthen the hip and thigh muscles. I hated them, but lunges, walking lunges, squats, and abdominal work all really contributed to helping me master skating.) Possibly, though, the abdominal stuff was because I have uh a lot to counterbalance and so my back was always what gave me trouble when I was skating-- for my entire career, I suffered from back pain while skating and those were the first muscles to get tired, and where I suffered my worst injury, before the uh epic double ankle sprain that had nothing to do with skating but ended it anyway. But for most people, the limiting factor was thigh muscle strength, so you literally cannot do too many thigh-strengthening exercises.)

[unicornduke]

I need to learn to skate backwards without being so wobbly. I'm not very good at it right now. Then I'll have a lot better luck. My right hip is still feeling the cramp this morning so my stretching wasn't adequate for whatever happened there.

ughhhhh working out sucks but fine. I should be doing those anyway to help with hip stuff too.

[graydon]

One of the things that can help is to stand with just your toes on the edge of a stair and let your ankles sink as low as they'll go below the level of your toes, hold it for a bit, and then rise as high as you can on tiptoes, hold that, and repeat a few times.

Important to have something to hold and good traction for your toes! Plus the usual "don't bounce" and "slowly" caveats.

One of the tricky bits with anything whole-body is that the ow usually winds up wherever the muscles have to manage the strain, but that isn't necessarily where the muscles are weakest; that can be where the compensating behaviour goes. So it can be effective to work the bits that aren't aching some.