Falling On Your Face and Loving it

Falling on ice hurts. A lot. When I first started hockey, I was terrified. I remembered those cold winter nights as a kid skating on our neighbor's pond with rickety figure skates that didn't fit me and how much more banged knees and elbows hurt at 17 degrees. I figured re-learning how to skate would hurt like that, and it was going to SUCK.

The first day I skated with my borrowed hockey pads changed my life.

 I fell, a lot. My first game I looked like Bambi if he was trying to swim across the ice, not even bothering to try standing anymore.

But the glorious thing about hockey pads is they make the ice like a gentle pillow, catching you in it's chilly arms and lowering you gently to the floor. Sort of.

 Getting hit, that still hurts, but learning to skate is so much less terrifying when you know that falling isn't going to set you weeping like a tween at a Beiber concert.

I hear from my friends (and husband) all the time that they would give hockey a try, but they don't know how to skate. What they are really saying is that they don't want all the pain and humiliation associated with learning to skate again. Those giant and oh-so-sexy hockey pants are the best, they really are. I have flung myself to the ice at every possible angle like the flopping fish-out-of-water that I am and came up unscathed.

So to those who say they can't play because they can't skate I saw HOGWASH. Absolutely anyone can learn. The day I started learning there was a five-year-old boy out on the red line with his teacher and a brand new pair of hockey skates. He wore his Yzerman jersey that day and toddled up and down that red line, falling many times each pass. I had to pick myself up as many times as he did, but if that brave little boy with his favorite Red Wings jersey could do it, I could man up, get up and try again.

After a few months of playing under my belt, and much coaching and practice, Bambi only shows up once in a great while. Thanks to my pads, only my pride is ever bruised.