Personal Training - dynamic shots

A must-win Semi Final game for the Wheelers tomorrow, followed by the Grand Final if we succeed (more on that later), both added a certain urgency and bred a certain caution in my evening skate tonight.  About 23'C, 60% humidity, skated home under rosepink clouds.

Rotated the wheels (swap inside/outside edges / left/right foot) before I set out.  I should have done this earlier this week because the inside edges (rear wheel of right skate in particular) were well and truly worn.  Just like a car, one needs to rotate the wheels/tyres to get maximum life and most even wear out of them.  With potentially two games tomorrow and the wheels already in need of rotation I didn't want to risk finding myself needing to do it before/during the second game.  Skates are always a little uncertain until one grinds off the sharpness of the realigned surfaces of the rotated wheels.

Luckily, it served my purpose to be forced to take it a little more carefully tonight.  I certainly didn't want to pick up either injury nor strain, nor to break the muscles down to the point that they'd still be unregenerated by puck drop tomorrow.  Nor so depleted of fluid and energy that am still recovering.  So, the late departure brought about by the wheel change also played into my general scheme (you know you're going with the flow when everything is pulling in the same direction!).

Getting to the court/rink, I had full intention to get straight into shooting with my two surviving pucks (after confirming that the neon orange inline puck truly is a waste of time on the undulating ashphalt as it continually starts rolling on its edge more than sliding on it's flat surface).  Which I proceeded to do.  Found that it was taking significantly longer with only two pucks, that I was very inaccurate, and that my heart wasn't in this one tonight.  Lucky I worked this out early in the gig.

As the overall intention is to have fun at training, I 'changed it up' and started practicing the moves associated with appearing to deke one way but taking off the other (the basic 'fake' that was used so well against us by John Platten of the Rockers two games ago).  I have the basic moves and worked out some of the micro-detail (eg. the necessary rotation of the stick/deke when accelerating off a back hand fake or the inevitability of losing the puck off the blade middway) but doubt very much this will show itself in my game tomorrow directly (in the 'live time' of a game, if one needs to think about a move before doing it, there won't be enough time left after thinking about it to actually do it*).  It might, however, provide a bit more of an edge when faced with an agile puck carrier.

Then, I stepped it up another notch by switching to some dynamic shooting drills.  This time round I left the pucks at the 30' line and skated in from centre.  I gathered puck fore/back hand, deked, and made sure I was gliding in face-on by the 15' circle for a shot.  Cycled through this a couple times.  Then, stepped it up further, this time picking the puck up while moving away from the goal (in all configurations), curling back left/right into a glide and having a shot.  Finally, pushed the evening all the way by doing faking with the deke in the sequence before the glide and making sure I got to the rebound.  Quite tricky, if I can one day master it!

By which time the sun had set and it was time to skate home and call it a night.

* Perhaps the unique (?) property of noradrenaline (both a neurotransmitter and a hormone) is a relevant consideration here, especially when looking at the process of developing 'muscle learning'?!