"It's not you, it's me"

So went the opening line of the email I sent last night, informing my league that I will no longer be skating this season. It can't come as a surprise to any regular readers of this, really, even if we don't talk much in real life. I'd felt my attention drifting for some time and my time away made me realise that I didn't actually miss skating. It was time to go.

2012 promo shot. (c) Pirate City Rollers.
For posterity. 

 My dad used to race classic motorcycles and I grew up learning about the TT, various GPs and the men who rode and died on the track. I remember when hearing about one such case my dad saying that in racing even the best rider can have a crunch point. An accident or a near miss beyond which they never fully regain their mental sharpness. They take the corner a little slower, they pull back instead of throttling on, and they know it's over. It might not be their biggest accident, or an accident at all, but one incident will be the hammer blow to their confidence. So it proved.

 My point wasn't breaking my ankle. It wasn't even an injury I sustained. It is, however, an incident that still gives me nightmares and I haven't written about it until now. My best friend in the league had broken her leg at scrimmage a fortnight beforehand and I'd spent a long night in the hospital with her. I was recovering from my own ankle surgery to remove the plates and it was my second scrimmage back. It was a mixed scrimmage due to our first bout of the season happening that weekend, and everyone was taking it easy. I was in the pack, in a wall with some other skaters when the woman to my left took a massive can-opener. She went into me at the same time another skater in front of me hit the deck. It was a fairly standard mid-jam pack pile-up, the kind that happens all the time. Only this time I felt something give way under my shin in the fall that shouldn't. Something that wasn't part of my body. It felt sickening. Then there was screaming. I helped as much as I could, then went home after a shell-shocked drink in the local bar. I stayed up almost all night, shaking and crying from the shock of being involved. I felt responsible. I phoned my mum back in the UK at 3am (the only time I've been thankful for time zones) saying over and over "I broke her leg, oh god, I broke her leg". I spent hours wanting to throw up, and when I finally slept my dreams were the worst kind.

 I went to see her in hospital the next day, where the x-ray made the fractures look almost artistic, like filigree. I was reassured that it wasn't my fault, just as I had assured Grenade that it wasn't hers when I'd had my accident. I remembered how I'd meant every word when I said it to her, so I believed it when the same was said to me. However, I never really got over it. I played the bout that Saturday and we won but it wasn't like it had been before. I coached and tried to keep things going in my head but on the track I wasn't the same. Without the high I got from skating, it started to feel like a job. I started to resent the time it demanded of me where before I had welcomed it as a major part of my life. Like those TT riders who'd had one incident too many, I backed off instead of throttling on. I stopped engaging the opponent when I needed to, I started feeling like a spare wheel in the pack. I didn't make the travel team cut, and then a week before our last bout I partially dislocated my kneecap doing a turnaround toe stop, which impacted on my running, not to mention walking, sitting down, and driving. Enough was enough.

 It feels like a break up in many ways. Derby was there for me at a critical point in my life. It was a piton to hang my week from when avalanches threatened to rip me off the wall. It was an area to improve, the gains coming steadily and progress measurable at a time when it felt like I was failing everywhere else. It offered a lot of positives when I desperately needed them and I'll always be grateful for that. I'll miss having it in my life but, like all break ups, it comes with that feeling that here's an opportunity to make some positive changes. 

At the Rainbow Warrior, two weeks before the incident.

So where to from here? Well, it's now less than a hundred days to the marathon. I have some money squirrelled away and I'm considering buying a decent road bike and getting into triathlon training again for the summer. The New Zealand Alpine Club are meeting in a couple of weeks, I might go along and see about finally getting into mountaineering after years of reading and thinking about it. The local mountain bike park has a women's riding group (the Cranksistas- love that name) and I might do up my old thing and go say hi. With better weather comes scuba diving, which I definitely want to do more of. There's a lot out there, and thanks to roller derby I'm ready to go and explore.