one clumsy girl

Wednesday’s class ended with everyone taking turns going one-on-one against the goalie. If we didn’t beat him, we had to do push ups.

My first shot was weak, went off the goalie’s left leg. Pushups for me! I couldn’t get the tip of my skate into the ice well enough to stay still enough to do a pushup without my feet sliding all over the place.

My second shot was also weak, but I lifted it, just north of the crest. With a bit more force and an earlier release, I may have scored.

Not completely awful for my first two shots on a real official ice hockey goalie, though!

Other things learned:

• I like to compensate for a lame outer edge by going extra deep on my inner. It doesn’t really work (and in fact I think slows me down), but it feels cool.
  
• my backwards skating sucks. Horribly. My left foot will not move AT ALL if my legs are tired, it just drags along.
  
• my left skate does not like to sit on the flat of the blade. We did a drill where we take one push and hold the leg up in the air and balance as far as we can. Benny said that pros should all be able to take one push and go goal line to goal line. I don’t even think I made it goal line to top of the crease!
  
• I think my problem with my wrist shot was where the puck is relative to my feet. I did find that I started transferring my weight more, so much that I would end up with my back (right) leg up in the air and all of my weight on my front (left) leg. That’s probably a positive thing. I also find that my wrist shot is easier to take if I am already moving, not just standing along the boards.

I had a horrible class this week — not that I didn’t have fun (because I did), I just felt like I couldn’t do anything we drilled on. I was the worst person in the class during the backwards skating drills — super slow and simply not able to physically do some of the things we were drilling on. I was extremely frustrated by the time class was over.

Also, the velcro on one of my jocks isn’t clinging anymore, so one of my stockings kept falling down during class (despite tape and velcro straps). I think I’ll be adding some extra velcro to it.

Any hints for how to keep my elbow pads from falling down? The fact is that elbow pads are always going to be wider above the elbow than below, so of course they want to fall down. I think hubs has better designed elbow pads, but he said that his keep falling down, too.

I added some tape to the velcro on the center of the elbow pad (mostly to keep my jersey from catching) and that helped a few weeks ago, but this week they kept falling down. Annoying!

I’m not sure what we’ll be doing in class on Wednesday, but I’m off to the rink Monday or Tuesday afternoon for stick ‘n shoot.