Do you ever want to try something new but you’re scared of making a fool out of yourself? I’ve spent most of my life backing out of new things because I was scared to look stupid in front of people around me, but equally, there’s always part of my brain that desperately wants to learn new things.
During the initial months of the lockdown in 2020, when I thought I was quite literally going to die of boredom, I started taking serious interest in roller skating. For those who are not familiar, there are rollerblades that have inline wheels and then there are roller skates or “Quad” skates, and they’re the old school ones that sit on top of four wheels. I first became interested in roller skating a couple of years prior to the pandemic, I was always interested but too sheepish to try. I love the look of the quad skate, there are a million different ways you can dress up your skates and I was captivated by the thought of moving around so weightlessly. The thing was I wasn’t happy with my body and I didn’t want to be the chubby girl making a clown of herself in front of everyone, because I had kind of spent my entire husky child life doing that, and after a while, you get scared of what others might say because you kinda know what they might say. However, where I thought my body type might be a hindrance, I met people in my university class that actively roller skated and I remember one day they eyed me up and down before asking “you ever try roller derby? You have a great build for it”
As I learned that day, it turns out having a stocky build with a little extra natural padding is actually good for roller derby, and much to my surprise there were a lot of people with similar bodies to me out there. The thing with derby is that you kinda need to know how to skate, and you should be able to do it well because you’re going to get bumped around A LOT and I definitely wasn’t there yet having never put my foot in a roller skate.
Returning to 2020, I was bored out of my mind not working or going to school and so I looked at roller skating again. I found a local skate supply company by the name of Roller Girl in Vancouver and after some consideration, I picked up a pair of skates, helmets, and pads. I was very excited but also I had no one to show me what to do, so I looked it up on YouTube and by George there were good roller skating souls out there who had the demos for skate basics that I so desperately needed.
I didn’t leave my garage for about a week, I needed to learn how to roll, and most importantly STOP, and the garage worked because it was flat and easy to glide on. There’s a few different ways to stop on quad skates but the obvious one uses the stopper at the front of the boot, this is called a “toe stop” and it was a learning curve for me especially since the minimal experience I had was on inline skates and those have the brake pad at the back of the skate.
There are a lot of different styles of skating, there are different cuts of boots, trucks, and wheels depending on if you are going up ramps at the skate park versus tearing up an indoor derby rink, but what I was doing is basic sidewalk skating. My boots are high cut and the wheels are much softer than the ones you find in a park or rink setting, the idea being that when you run over rough concrete you won’t go flying. That was probably the hardest thing to learn for me, because I am kind of a chicken when it comes to getting injuries and even though I had padded myself up to the max I just didn’t want to go flying.
Learning how to fall was probably the most important step though, as I quickly found myself wanting more space to skate on than on the garage floor, the second I put my skates on in the cul de sac and stood up I was freaked out about not being able to control myself and falling, so I just kinda stood there. My younger sister had a pair of inline skates and she was a lot more skilled on hers than I was on mine, and I felt a little stupid just standing there while she was gliding around in the carefree way I wanted to be. A valuable thing I learned is that, you can wipe out just standing there, and that’s exactly what happened because my legs were not bent, and if you don’t keep your knees bent on quads you literally fall over backwards.
What I learned from Youtube was to keep your knees bent and if you are wearing your knee pads (which you should) you can crouch lower and if you fall you just land on your knees. It turns out practicing falling on your skates teaches you to anticipate the movements and after a while you fall less because your body knows how to correct itself.
What I found, which might be more obvious to the more fearless readers out there, but for the ones like me who are too afraid to learn something new for fear of making a fool out yourself is that the less afraid I was to fall down, the better I got at not falling altogether. You don’t become good at something without making mistakes, sometimes you literally have to fall on your butt to learn, but the more you practice the more you can anticipate correcting those mistakes, the important thing is to always at least try. No one can make fun of you for having the nerve to try something new.