Training and Goals

This was written the first year of our home teams and never published. I’m publishing it now as this was before I found out about my COPD.

A new season begins for my roller derby league and we are experincing a lot of growth and I am excited to be a part of this. I started training with a personal trainer that I love working with and I have seen progress in my personal fitness. I will get play for a home team the Clutch City Crushers this year but I won’t be playing on the All Stars. I am obviously disappointed in my performance not being up to that challenge but happy that I will at least get to play. This will be a new experience for our league but I love my new team mates and think we can do well. I will be ramping up the training and working this recovery.

I got to go to our hosted bootcamp with Coach Spanx and it was an awesome training session. I have lots of personal goals and actual things to work on to improve my agility. This has been something I have not been good at but have not had a good regimine to work on for this. I got that this weekend and I am so going to work on it like crazy.

Being an athelete and a part of team was something that I never thought I would do. When I was 5 I lost hearing in my left ear from inner ear bone damage. That means that hearing aids are useless and it is considered a handicap. I got help with college tuition because of this but other than that is has always been a hinderance to me and part of my insecurity growing up. I can compensate pretty well most of the time. I tried playing difference sports for fun such as softball, basket ball and tennis and raquet ball. I had bad experinces with the team sports because of my inablility to hear well especially when there is a lot of background noise. After being introduced to roller derby, it took me 4 months to work up the courage to actual go and give it a try. I fell in love with it because I had always loved to skate. I am also very competitive. I was terrified of not being able to hear and how that would hinder me from being a part of this sport.

All of this made me hesitant to even tell people that I had this handicap. Why? Because some people do not want someone with a handicap playing on their team and they do not know how to adjust to interact with them during games because the hearing world is so dependant on hearing. I learn more and better by watching than by hearing and I discovered that other people learned this way and more people than I ever knew had the handicap I did.

Today, I tell people and remind people constantly. I wear a sticker on the left side of my helmet that is the universal sign for hearing impaired. It is a part of me in all things and I have learned to own it and embrace it. So I started my roller derby journey at 49 in September of 2010 and here I am still working to stay a part of it!