Receive, don’t resist
At a derby bout, the track is a very crowded place. There are people zipping about everywhere. There are the announcers, the referees, the non-skating officials, the bench coaches, the hoards of adoring fans, league members selling merch and snacks...and of course the skaters on each of the teams. The standard roster of skaters on a team is 15. For any one jam, 5 skaters from each team are on the track, blocking, and juking, and checking the hell out of each other for up to two minutes. Within 30 seconds, the next line is up to duke it out in the next jam. And this continues over and over until the whistle blows signaling the end of the period or the end of the event. A full roster means that any given skater has at least 5 minutes of recovery time between jams. And let me tell you, from experience, that a skater needs every second of it. The jammers have to sprint around the ~200 feet of track only to come crashing into, and somehow push through, an almost impenetrable wall of rock solid bodies. The blocker line takes the jammers full impact as she hammers away at the seams or zips this way and that trying to create a space to get through. The backwards skating brace, with the strength and solidity of a statue, instructs the blocker line, prepares them for the impending impact, and keeps them steady against the constant jammer assault. And the mental game the pivot maintains, keeping constantly aware of the opposing jammer and also being ready at a moment’s notice to receive a star pass from their own jammer if in distress, is an incredible and draining feat. After any jam, most every skater, be them a championship level derby athlete or a Bambi skater in their first scrimmage, returns to the bench dripping in sweat and heaving for air. Even in the best of circumstances, with a filled out roster, a five minute break to recover from all that is the bare minimum.
“[It] isn’t only about being strong, ... [it] is about making due with less and learning to take the hits as they come. It is about acceptance.”
Like many other amateur sports leagues, derby activities are a grassroots effort and leagues are run ‘by the skaters, for the skaters’. For many good sized leagues, operating in the best of circumstances and filling a roster to field a complete line up of skaters and alternative is easy. But many leagues operate in rural, remote, or impoverished communities, making recruitment and retention an ongoing challenge. This is namely because, first, derby is an expensive sport. I paid well over $1000 between my dues, the gear I purchased and my travel costs my first year skating. (To help with this access issue, many leagues offer a loaner gear program but let’s be real, that gear is nasty and you only use it as long as you absolutely have to). Because of the steep learning curve, derby also requires a big time commitment. It took me many months of practice to be competent and when minimum skills were still required, I knew several people who kept at it for a year or more trying to pass these benchmarks. Though skating has seen a bit of a resurgence of late, the places where a derby practice or bout could be safely held are limited and dwindling, meaning that league members may have to drive great distances to practice or compete. I knew several women on the team who drove well over an hour each way to participate in derby practices. So often leagues have to play short of a full roster and for quite a while the league I skated with was one of these. There were several bouts where we skated with less than 10. Some practices were attended by only 5 people. I can only imagine how challenging trying to arrange plays for so few people was for our captain and the other league veterans. That’s where, for my league, a drill we called partner edging came in.
This endurance drill is definitely challenging. Pairs of teammates square off, face to face and spread out across the whole track. On the whistle, one person blocks with their chest as much as they can while the other person pushes them down the track. The real challenge is that neither the Blocker nor the Pusher can use their toe stops to help their cause. Instead, all a Pusher can do is take step after bowlegged step to get enough power pushing off the edges of their wheels to move forward without slipping. And the poor Blocker … they have it even worse. Without the use of toe stops there is absolutely no hope of stopping the Pusher from moving forward; all they can do is take the hits and swing their feet back and forth like a pendulum to limit the advancement. And the Blocker better not lean too heavily on the Pusher as they apply their ever constant pressure because the second the Pusher lets up, the Blocker might find themselves flat on their faces and the Pusher long-gone. It is all kinds of hard.
To build our strength, we did this exhausting partner edging drill as part of our warm up for every practice for months and I hated almost every minute of it. That was until a teammate of mine, Madea K Jefa, explained to me the trick to this drill and with it, the real point. The key to edging is to not resist, but instead to simply receive the hits. This is because edging isn’t only about being strong and getting stronger; edging is about learning to making due with less and take the hits as they come. Edging is about acceptance.
My team (Madea K Jefa just behind me) skating a lap around the track in celebration of an almost victory against the Southern Delaware Roller Girls. Even though we were skating with a thin roster, our edging work really paid off. (Photo credit: Mr. Fancy).
Everyone wants to win a bout and everyone wants to help their team as much as possible. But when your team is playing down in numbers, you have to accept that competing against a team with a full roster is going to be a steep uphill climb; winning will be a long shot. You have to accept that as a skater competing against those odds, you are going to be tired. You are not going to be able to do everything that is needed of you on the track. Sometimes, when your whole team is bridged out as far as the can be from the rest of the pack, when you are alone with opposing jammer, all you will be able to do is slow down, but not stop, her progress. All you will be able to do is maybe buy your team a few extra feet, a few precious seconds for your own jammer to escape the pack, a few extra points the opposing jammer does not score against your team. You have to accept that this is what you can do and that this is enough in this moment.
Receive, don’t resist. Accept, don’t avoid. It is a hard lesson to learn, and it took me entirely too long, but once I learned to absorb the hits and accept my limits, it changed how I saw the game and saw myself. In a follow-up post, I will write about how this skill manifests for me in my practice of science.
