Hiking and Roller Derbies: How could you go wrong?

A fun post for a change.  This past weekend I had the opportunity to go hiking with my church group and also to go with several of my friends to a roller derby.  The hiking I’ve done before—it was beautiful as always.

The roller derby, now that was something entirely different.

I am hopeless when it comes to sports: people have told me the rules of football at least four separate times and I forget them almost as soon as my very patient teachers stop speaking. I can’t even remember the rules to card games! So it should be no surprise that it took me the first half of the roller derby to get a general grasp on the rules. As far as I understand, the basic idea is that the one girl on each team who’s able to score gets points for lapping as many members of the opposing team as possible, and the opposing team’s one and only goal is to stop her from doing that.

There are rules, and there are helmets and padding involved, but I spent a good deal of time thinking it looked rather like women’s rugby on roller skates. We sat in the “danger seating”—on the floor right around the track, where we could be easily fallen upon, and even though we escaped without injury, our lives flashed before our eyes more than once over the course of the two-hour game.

The best part of the roller derby culture is that each player (and each ref too, actually) has a derby name the way a wrestler has a stage name. They’re all violent and often pun on the girls’ real names or on their profession—the girl whose name was Demolition Plan (and whose number was C4, just for kicks), for example, is an architect. Each name is unique and registered, like the names of racehorses. A lovely way to occupy yourself during a time out, in fact, is to ponder what your own derby name would be if you ever decided to take up the sport.

Not that I plan on doing that any time soon—I’ve seen enough of the inside of ERs for one lifetime, thank you very much. But I wouldn’t pass up the chance to go again! Though next time I might opt to sit in the NON-danger seating.