So … Monday night clinic … yeah …
Not a good performance this week. I knew going in that it would be bad, but had no idea, really.
Last week I donated blood. And it was a double-red donation, so they took twice as many red-blood cells as a regular donation and I got a bunch of salt-water in return. It’s a fair trade, except for the part where I noticed a significant difference in my visits to the gym.
Each interval was much harder and took much longer to recover from. Not unexpected, but disheartening, so I expected to have poorer performance this week.
Before heading to the rink for the clinic, I drank a 5-hour energy. Now … I know that my problem is not solvable with an energy drink. I know this, but I drank it anyway … and it did not agree with me. I was queasy before I left the house.
So tonight I was drenched in sweat, out of breath, nauseated, and had burning calf muscles before the end of the warm up. It was bad. We went to the goal-line to line up for skating drill and I had to take a knee to rest my calves.
Skating drill tonight was goal-line to goal-line – first backward, then forward.
This was followed by a second rep, but this time carrying a puck. I can generally keep a puck with me (at least skating forward). I can generally skate backwards at a not too embarrassing speed. Tonight I learned that I cannot combine the two.
We were divided into two groups for this drill. I was in the first. So the coach would send the Ones and when we (well, everyone but me) got to a certain point (I don’t know where, because I wasn’t there yet), he’d send the Twos.
In the backward puck-carrying drill, the Twos passed me at the blue-line. The first blue-line. Yeah.
I fell somewhere in the neutral zone. And when I say “fell”, I mean that I lost the puck, stretched for it, and body-slammed the ice.
By the time I passed the second blue-line, both groups were at the other goal-line, lined up, and listening to the coach describe what the next drill would be.
I face-planted again at this point and noticed that the coach had stopped talking. I’m not sure if it was because of me falling or because he’d run out of ways to not say “as soon as that last guy makes it to the goal-line, we’re going to skate forward with the puck”.
He was grinning, so I said: “Dude, go ahead and laugh.”
He wanted to make me feel better, so he asked everyone who’d ever done that before to raise their hand and announced that everyone who didn’t raise their hand was a liar.
Now, let me tell you this, I know funny and me face-planting into the ice after everyone else has been finished for half a minute or so? That’s fucking funny. I deserved a couple laughs.
Unfortunately I don’t know what the rest of the drills tonight were, because, yes, after three lengths of the ice, I was done. I made it to the locker room and spent several minutes giving serious consideration to puking into the garbage can. Got my gear packed and into the car. Stopped the car on the way home to puke beside the road.
Fun night.
Lesson Learned: No energy drinks ever again. That’s not my problem and they don’t agree with me.
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