Team Practice, Round 2

Tuesday night we had the pleasure of practicing with the two teams from our league we had yet to practice with, the Pink Pistols and Camero Harem.  I've been hearing about the difficulty of Pistols/Camero practices for MONTHS.  They do 50 laps on the outside in 10 minutes for warmup.  They do 25 in five going in the reverse direction.  They'll make you vomit in the first five minutes.  They eat lead for breakfast and glass for dinner.  Oh wait.  I might have made up that last part.  My thoughts and feelings on this evolved from fear and trepidation to curiosity to outright anticipation.  Bring it on.  I want to see what team endurance really looks like. 
They weren't kidding about wanting to vomit in the first five minutes.
We started out with what I am now going to call 'roller derby suicides.'  In basketball, a suicide is where you run a quarter of the court, then back, then half, then back etc.  You remember these.  However, what we were doing was just stopping or taking a knee or doing something in the middle, then hitting the end, turning around and doing the same thing back.  As soon as we started I had a shocking revelation - I don't really know how to skate fast going in a long straight line.  Also, those damn turn around toe stops are not yet usable at high speeds.
The most feared drill of the evening wound up being my favorite.  We got into a pack of about 14 skaters and then chose one jammer.  Every player in the pack was to block, hit and generally try to kill the jammer while she tried to get through.  As I was blocking I kept thinking that I really didn't want to jam on this one.  That's a lot of people trying to kill you all at once.  Then I took a second to realize that we probably didn't have enough time for everyone to jam and I could probably get out of it.  About ten seconds later I found myself volunteering to jam.  Why?  No idea.
Now I know that I can hold my own at least for a while while jamming against 14 blockers.  It's actually hugely empowering.  I ran on my skates and it took several people to hit me before I ate it.  I consider this to be hugely successful.
<originally posted on 1.26.12>