Keep your chin up: where your eyes are looking, your body will follow

At any given derby practice you will see all kinds of derby folk. You will see veteran skaters zipping around turns, dancing across the line, vaulting over the apex, and stopping on a dime. You will see experienced skaters honing their skills, perfecting their plows, and building their strength to be able to block with the best of them. And you will see the newbies, looking on, eyes wide with fear, wondering ‘how am I ever going to be able to do any of this???’

I remember those early feelings of existential dread well. Of course, I and most every other skater try to learn these skills, spending most of our first few skating attempts staring down at our feet as we will our muscles to do these strange new movements. And, in spite of our best efforts, we generally wind up on our butts, at least at first. It is neither pretty nor fun.

But I get why newbie skaters do it; when I was a fresh meat trainee, I fell right into this trap too. Looking down is about focusing only on yourself and your experience. Looking down is about feeling safe. Looking down is about maintaining a sense of being in control. And of course these things are appealing to a scared bambi skater barely stable enough to stand.

But what most new skaters come to realize is that the reason we find ourselves splayed out on the ground is that this is exactly where we were focusing and therefore exactly where we were always meant to go. Looking down means that you are going down. You might be ok for a while, but the second something changes, the second you lose your balance, the second someone bumps you, the second something ‘bad’ happens to you, you will be on the floor. And even if you fall small, the floor is not a place you want to be for vey long in roller derby.

Keeping my eyes focused on the goal ahead, busting a hole through the wall and to the empty space on the track where there are no blockers. Morgantown Roller Vixens vs Southern Delaware, Oct 2019 (Photo credit: Chase Diem Derby Photography)

So eventually, with lots of time, practice, and falling, we all get there, spending progressively less time on the floor and hopefully learning a few absolute truths of derby along the way. I’ve written about a few of these before, like Falling Small, Practicing Jamnesia, and Finding Your Friends. But another key lesson that everyone must come to know on their derby journey is this: keep your chin up and your focus forward’.

This lesson is absolutely critical because where your eyes are looking, your body will follow. Though taking your focus away from your feet is scary, looking up reveals new horizons and it is important for a number of reasons. Looking up means seeing where you are, seeing where you are going, and seeing how you are going to get there. Looking up means being track aware and seeing the obstacles in your way like the massive churning pack of bodies in your path or that opposing blocker en route to lay you out. Looking up means seeing inside yourself to trust that your body will know how to do what is needed when the time comes. Getting to this place is a critical part of everyone’s derby journey, and all it takes is a little bit of time, some practice, and more than a few bruises to achieve.

Some other great tips and words of encouragement for newbie skaters

The same lesson applies to the research journey too, though most newbie scientists get through their PhDs with significantly fewer bruises. Like I did when I was a bambi skater learning derby, I certainly had much to learn about what it means to be a scientist when I became a graduate student. Like derby, science requires a whole new skill set, and a whole new set of ‘muscles’, a whole new way of thinking. My first part of graduate school was uncomfortable as a I built these new intellectual muscles. I worked hard trying to hone my skills but it was also overwhelming. I turned inward, focused on myself, and kept my head down as I pipetted away in isolation. As I struggled and toiled away at the bench, I became depressed and even more introspective/perseverative, which only worsened the bad case of grad school tunnel vision I had developed. And I stayed that way, for years testing one hypothesis at a time, executing one study, interpreting the results, publishing the findings and moving on to the next study in line.

Jamming around the final turn prepping to take another pass through the pack, with eyes on the blockers I am about to crash into. Morgantown Roller Vixens vs Southern Delaware, Oct 2019 (Photo credit: Chase Diem Derby Photography)

But this is only part of what it means to be a scholar and I didn’t realize how much this academic narrow-mindedness was hurting me scientifically. It wasn’t enough that I was working hard. Anyone with proper training can do the lab work and most people in science work hard. Early on, I was that anyone. There was not much I was doing that couldn’t be done by another set of hands. I wasn’t thinking or acting like a scholar. What I needed to learn to be able to make that transition was how to look up from my work, look around, and open my mind with a new viewpoint. I needed to leverage the skills of my labmates, who had optimized techniques I was trying to teach myself. I needed to engage my colleagues in other fields who could offer unique insights about the meaning of my data. I needed to read broadly from multiple fields to grow my understanding about my work in the greater context of biomedical research. And it took far too long for me to realize how critically important to my career this was.

That’s because looking up from the bench and keeping your focus forward is important in science for a number of reasons. Looking up is how you better plan, anticipate challenges, devise solutions, and execute your experiment. It is how you see the big picture of your projects and how your work fits into the broader context of science. This is how insight, inspiration, innovation, and impact emerge. And perhaps most importantly, looking up allows you to see yourself on your scientific journey, a journey sometimes without a clear destination but one where you can measure progress from where you started. So to all would-be scholars out there, this journey is long, and it is hard, but it is a path worth navigating because when you learn to keep you chin up and your focus forward, you and the scientific community will be the better for it.