Oh, the pain
Written by Lesley EVisserate, Tuesday October 06 2009
Ever wake up and been unable to bend your right knee? I get that about twice a month. It's part of playing roller derby. Covering the NFL, I've gotten to see players go from the hot to the cold tub, get CAT scans, MRIs and the attentive care of the best doctors in New York.
As a skater we get... a copay.
(Luckily, my joint guys also treat the NHL's Rangers so I can't say the quality is different, even though they aren't as quick to send me to get scanned.)
One of my teammates uses pads to numb her kneecaps before practice and many of us wear Gladiator gaskets under our kneepads. There are painful shoulders and bad backs, swollen ankles and blisters so raw that some of us duct tape an entire foot before putting it in the skate.
Derby is real. We don't script this stuff, and when we hit polished cement or sport court, it hurts. Luckily, one of our skaters is an emergency room nurse, so when a collision is really bad, she tells us whether or not to call an ambulance. In my two years, I've seen about a half dozen players leave practice or a bout on a gurney.
I fell twice on my right knee about two weeks ago and couldn't bend my right knee despite icing it, so I went to my joint guy. He said to take it easy for a week. When I went to practice but skipped the contact drills, Vixen Von Bruisen joked that I hurt my "wussy bone."
That's the thing. If you get hurt, you get up and skate. Everyone is hurt at some level. You just can't throw yourself at another human speeding around a track and expect to feel great as time goes on. Every skater is expected to have insurance and we are covered as a group in order to do contact drills. If you aren't covered, you can't play.
We also cross-train to get stronger, so that our bodies don't break down. We practice falling so that when it inevitably happens, we don't take everyone out with us or get our fingers crushed by other people's skates. Kickin McNuggitz, above, is trying to get up without using her hands.
But we try to play through things if we can.
My joint guy cleared me and asked if I had any other questions. I said I wondered if I might be doing long term damage to my knees if they kept taking a pounding.
"That's a valid concern," he said with a smile.
I'm still thinking I can get him to come to a bout.
Above photo by Megan Moss Freeman, which prompted Rita Wayward to say, "Get your bony shoulder out of my ribcage, Lesley!"
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LOL! Great write-up on a sport that gets zero, if any, sports coverage. I think too many people put roller derby in the same category as amateur boxing and pro wrestling; a low-class sport for people who just like to break bones. Glad to see that intelligent, well-spoken, proper young ladies enjoy jamming their boney shoulders into other girls' ribcages for sport, too.