ow my knees

so, my pads gave my knees VD.

are you sure you still want to read?

haha. so like, it's been hot as a motherfuck in baltimore recently. like, way too hot for the first week of june. i think of the kids in elementary school or high school sitting in mostly un-ac'd classrooms and want to pour out a solo cup of country time for them. i went to catholic school as a kid and those polyester jumpers and wool knee socks were no joke. once in a while they'd let us wear our "gym suits" to school if the temp was over 900 degrees or so. red shirt, blue shorts. sometimes, friendly teachers would let us make fans out of construction paper. unfriendly teachers would stipulate that the energy you expended waving the fan would actually make you HOTTER. this is wrong. grammar and spelling make you hotter.

so the rink where we practice is minimally air conditioned. monday night's practice was basically a full house, because it featured team scrimmages, and there's a bout on saturday!! so, it was about 97,000 degrees in skateland monday night, and i'd estimate that there were about 65 girls there.

we did a very long blocking snake drill that warrants its own post. i don't know how to block, or get blocked, and this was kind of a rough intro!! but more on that later.

after the snake drill it was time for "falls n sprawls." here is what falls and sprawls is all about: you start out lying on your tummy at one end of the rink. whistle blows and you sprint to the other end of the rink, fall on all fours, spin around, get up, sprint back to the other end of the rink, repeat for 2 mins. that doesn't seem like that long, but trust me, it is. it's a lot of falling. and getting up. getting up, and then breaking into an immediate sprint.

after that, the teams did a scrimmage/mock bout while the noobs worked on more drills in the dark corner of the rink. we did some pack drills and some "synchronized skating" drills and some backwards skating work coached by Joy Collision. I suck at backwards skating, by the way.

Anyway when the time came to take off our pads at the end of practice, I noticed that my knees were a little bit red.

Cut to tues morn. I woke myself up by scratching my legs bloody. my knees were covered in this hivey, itchy, painful, raised rash. ew ew ew!! i slathered some neosporin + pain on it and wore shorts to work.

Next day it wasn't any better. I cringed at the thought of putting my kneepads back on. i posted a question to ask metafilter and also to the charm city mailing list, asking if anyone knew how i could make this ouchy itchy rash go away. ask metafilter berated me for not washing my pads. CCRG berated me for not washing my pads. i should have washed my pads. why didn't i wash my pads?!?!

One of the CCRG skaters replied with a story about a former skater who got a terrible staph infection from skateland. I immediately got terrified and started calling every doctor in the area. No one would see me. I ended up going to an urgent care place in Lutherville, MD on the recc of another rollergirl, and they were GREAT. (PatientFirst, in case you were wondering.) They said it wasn't staph or anything horrible like that, just a bad case of contact dermatitis. i know that sounds lame but they thought it was severe enough to give me a shot of steroids in the butt, and a big dose of steroid pills, and some steroid cream. should i hit the gym or something?

the steroid pills made me feel totally crazed, and actually i still feel totally crazed. those pills mess with you, for serious. but my legs are looking and feeling a whole hell of a lot better. dudes, wash your pads. i know it's kind of funny to talk about our rink stink but it turns out that you can actually get quite sick from it. there is some grody stuff up in there.

sorry so gross! less grossness next time.

here is something about hockey players and their gross pads.



see you at the bout tmw,
sicky nixx