Our sold-out season opener. That’s me on the poster, although I’m not playing thanks to the uncooperative ligament in my knee. Going to the osteo on Tuesday; really hoping for good news.

I made the travel team!

I’m going to go and celebrate this arangement by making a delightful peach and coconut tart.

I choked last night. I’ve had bouts before that I didn’t feel great about, but I haven’t had an all-out tantrum throwing, crying-at-half-time, refusing-to-talk-about-it-afterwards kind of bout since we played Brisbane back in July. Both times I just got out there and it felt all wrong. My mind was somewhere else. My hits didn’t connect, I had no awareness of where my jammer was, and I was an all-around waste of space on the track.

I don’t really care about winning or losing. I just care about how I played. I want to come off the track feeling like a hero. When I do, it’s the best feeling in the world. It’s why I spend at least so much time training and why I no longer have a social life and why all I do is think about derby. It’s all for that feeling of getting it right and having the crowd scream your name.

I don’t know what happened last night. I’m not very good under pressure, and as well as being our grand final for the year, I also had my Mumsie in the crowd from Perth, who’s never seen me skate before. I had most of my friends and some of my co-workers there. A month ago I played a killer game when no one was there to watch and we didn’t really need the win to go on to the final. There’s something about having to live up to expectations that gives me a mental block. I’m much happier being the underdog and going out onto the track with something to prove.

I’ve never been any good at anything athletic. I had never played sport in my life before I took up derby. I was always the art fag thumbing my nose at team sports and thinking that the kind of girls that played netball were mindless idiots. I’ve worked my ass off to be at the level of skill I’m at, yet I’ll never have anything on the girls that grew up playing sports and are naturally talented. I don’t have any experience in mentally dealing with the highs and lows of putting it all on the line with 1300 people watching, either. I think this quote from one of my friends in the league sums it up nicely.

“I really think there’s something in not having learnt how to play sport. Not derby specifically, or any other particular sport, but sport as competition where you push yourself personally and physically and the ultimate outcome is extreme - you’re either a winner or a loser - and knowing how to manage that; what to do with it. I never learnt that. Moreover, I never learnt how to deal with mistakes - fucking up is standard in sport, but for the uninitiated a mistake on the track is a reflection of being a fuck-up as a human being. So, for instance, I’m unable to respond to a mistake with “ok, I did it, will try not to do it again, and now I shall move on…”. Rather, I soul search for the explanation that *must* lie somewhere in the fact that *I* am fundamentally a fuck-up.”

I get that. I respond poorly to making mistakes and fucking things up in ‘real-life’ too, but by bouting, I seem to be setting myself up for either success or failure, all whilst wearing a stupidly short skirt and fishnets in front of everyone I know.

Right now I feel like listing my skates on Ebay and handing over all of my league responsibilities to anyone who wants to take ‘em. But I won’t, because I don’t know who I’d be if I didn’t play derby, and I’d be devestated to not be a part of this amazing league. So I’ll just keep putting myself through the mental wringer because not playing is not an option. I just hope the dizzying highs decide to outweigh the terrifying lows in 2010.