Sunday Skate - Keen Overspeed

I wasn't originally going to go skating on Sunday at all (gulp).  This was a combination of the fact that the what-sounds-like-a-regular-shinny at Noarlunga was this week only able to go ahead at 9-11 in the evening.  Which is too late for me on a Sunday unless it's a game or team practice.  So, unless I reverted to the usual skate with B in the afternoon, I wouldn't be getting on my skates (it was too wet for inline in the neighborhood).  This, in turn, didn't look likely as he had left a message for me on the Saturday that he wasn't able to come with me due an important event.

So, I called up B to confirm that we weren't going and we could agree to go next Saturday (can't go on the Sunday next week), which was him being diplomatic as his busy diary had reorganised itself in twelve hours and he was now free to come with me 'if I wanted to go skating'.  As if!  And then my missus reminded me that I couldn't go next Saturday arvo either, so I called him again and said that unless he had got something else already planned, we might as well go skating.  To which he agreed.

Although the afternoon session at the Ice Arena had already started by the time we had the above conversation, we got our respective acts together well enough that we still had an hour and a half from when we arrived.  Actually, B said he'd been ready since the day before.  Keen!  It wasn't excessively crowded for a Sunday, and this reduced as the afternoon progressed to the point that the rink had only a score or so of people for the last twenty minutes.  Excellent.

I stayed on the ice for the whole eighty minutes we had available, alternating between 'just skating' for the intrinsic pleasure, drilling myself on particular techniques, and resting against the sideboards watching everyone else circulating while catching my breath after skating hard.  Very few people I have regular interaction with, though a few as always.  B seemed to find himself quite at home talking to some keen teens lurking teenlike in the corner in between bursts of creative high speed skating.  He said later that he squeezed in over a hundred hockey stops while he was there.

Me, I did ten sets of five stops each way with at least three paces between, picking up the intensity and hence the speed a little compared to last week (though still not pushing it to the max).  I did maybe ten laps backwards, getting the feel of my outside edges for pushing off on (again, not pushing it to a high level).  No jumps this week.  Maybe five laps of quick puck protection transitions along the board to my right (or a pretend board on my left).  The main energy well, however, was the ten laps I did where I accelerated hard on my toes between the blue lines in a clumsy stumbling attempt to get into overspeed mode.  I reckon I reached it a couple of times.  Will see if can't pump this up somehow and get some perceived control into it.

Then, a quick visit through the Powerplay skateshop to check out junior inline skates and sticks, a banana and orange juice afterwards, and then home.