Get Low
One of the first things you come to understand when you show up for your first day of Fresh Meat bootcamp is this cardinal rule of roller derby: get low. Actually, this is the second thing you will come to understand about derby. The first is the unimaginable horror that is the stank of the derby loaner gear given to new recruit skaters during Fresh Meat Bootcamp. It was, to put it mildly, a putrid mix of old sweat and dirty socks that was almost overpowering enough for me to say ‘No thanks, this isn’t for me’ before I had even laced up my skates. Smelling that awful smell for hours on end was uncomfortable to say the least. But I digress…
Get low! You will read this on advice threads posted about what to expect on your first day of Derby Bootcamp. You will be told this by veteran skaters as you are putting on your smelly gear for the first time. You will hear this from Training and Skills team members as you take your first tentative laps around the track. Get low, and then get lower! That’s because the derby playing position is skating with your knees slightly bent and your back end sticking out in a perpetual squat for the entire bout. Your quads will be burning and your glutes will be screaming, especially if you are like I was when I showed up to Fresh Meat and haven’t done squats in years.
Shot of me and my teammates during warmups at my first ever bout. Note the decidedly uncomfortable squat position every single one of us is in. Morgantown Roller Vixens vs Steel City Beamers, Sept 2018 (Photo credit: Don Chiurazzi)
But, as painful as this position is, we skate this way for a good reason and it is by far the most important lesson you will learn as a new skater. You are more stable in a squat. You take up more track space in a squat (a key feature of a successful blocker). And perhaps most importantly, you are much closer to the ground so that if you get knocked over or you lose your balance and take a tumble, you fall a much shorter distance. Most of Fresh Meat Bootcamp Day 1 is about learning to get comfortable in this decidedly uncomfortable position.
A great tutorial about ‘getting low’ in proper derby stance by Derby Warehouse
Getting low, or rather getting comfortable with being uncomfortable is a key part of my life off track too. As a scientist, I have to be comfortable with the idea that I don’t understand a lot about the world, although I’ve spent an extraordinary amount of time thinking about a problem and seeking knowledge about a particular topic. Every scientific question I pose and every experiment I do to attempt to answer it just scratches the surface of a phenomenon. Oftentimes, the results of an experiment don’t answer our question at all but instead generate ten new ones. And since our collective understanding of the natural world and the scientific tools we have to ask our questions is constantly evolving, we must be willing to admit that what we know is limited. In fact, a key point of graduate training, the thing every PhD student needs to realize as they stand in front of their peers and defend their work is that they don’t have all the answers. Admitting “I don’t know” out loud is uncomfortable, so much so that it takes years of studying and training, toiling, making mistakes, and learning to overcome to be able to do it well.
Getting comfortable with being uncomfortable also happens to be a key feature of resilience in mental health. Many people, especially those suffering from depression, work very hard to avoid emotional discomfort. We will often bury our negative emotions, lie to ourselves, project blame onto others, and use a whole host of other maladaptive strategies. I spent most of my 20’s employing many of these defense mechanisms in a misguided attempt to shield myself from discomfort and emotional pain. But discomfort avoidance is not a resilient strategy. Resilience is an active process that must be honed with practice and experience, that is experience with discomfort. When you avoid uncomfortable situations, as I did for many years, you rob yourself of both the knowledge that you can in fact endure that discomfort and the opportunity to hone the skills to overcome it. On the surface, this avoidant strategy works fairly well, at least for a while in the face of small challenges. It’s only when unaddressed unpleasant things pile up over time to become unbearable that a person has to face the negative emotional consequences of this avoidance behavior.
“Resilience is an active process that must be honed with practice and experience, that is experience with discomfort.”
Derby has a way of linking up discomfort avoidance behavior with its negative consequences in short order. And it didn’t take long for me to learn this important lesson. When I first started in roller derby, I was very afraid of falling and would skate nervously around the track trying to avoid a fall, because, … obviously I was afraid that hitting the ground would hurt. Let me tell you that this was a bad approach. First, it is an absolute certainty that YOU…WILL…FALL in derby. Skates are a great equalizer and there are just too many ways to get bumped. Everyone falls, all the time. And it won’t just hurt, it will hurt immensely.
My first big fall happened as I was learning lateral skating movements. As soon as I had pushed off the line, I could feel myself losing my balance and I knew I was in trouble. But rather that do the right but uncomfortable thing and get low, instead I stood straight up to try to catch myself. Within a second, my skates slipped out from below me, and I landed on the concrete floor squarely on my tailbone. My ears ringing, I crawled off the track in agony, spent the rest of practice with a bag of ice on my butt, and didn’t sit right for a week (embarrassingly, I had to bring a pillow with me to every meeting).
Beyond the pain, avoiding falling was a bad approach for a more important reason. If I had been low and skating at speed with confidence rather than meekly, my chances of falling, and falling catastrophically, would be substantially reduced. Thankfully a few aspirin, a two-day shipped order of crash pads, and this internalized lesson has helped me to get low and embrace the suck when I face challenges both on and off the track. So as I did with Roller Derby, I challenge you to find ways to get low and get comfortable being uncomfortable by taking an active role in developing your resilience.
