Violet Hunter

Greetings one and all.

I’m aware I’ve been neglecting this blog a little bit. This isn’t to say that I haven’t had many thoughts about derby during this past month… it’s more that the majority of them have been negative, and I thought it was a little bit too much to unload a steady stream of complaints about my failing physiology onto public webspace.

But then I thought - wait, hold up a minute - what is this blog actually for?

Training is turning out to be a queer mythical beast. I’ve been doing all sorts of things to try and lick myself into shape (ooh err). My best mate has been acting as my personal trainer, he’s got me doing circuits of squats, lunges, burpees, star jumps, superwomans etc etc three times a week to build leg and core strength, and I’ve also been doing as much swimming as my busy schedule will allow. Some days I feel ABSOLUTELY FANTASTIC. Like today, for example. A bloke in a local gym has started running a circuit session just for us rollerbillies, and although it was a mega-effort, I came out of that place grinning like an idiot, and feeling like I could run all the way home, just for the hell of it. Ok, so admittedly I don’t live that far away, but still. I really don’t like running. ^.~

However, the days when I feel like the powerful ripped love-child of Lara Croft and Lieutenant Ripley (just savour that thought for a moment) ready to slay all the zombies of Romsey Town… are few and far between. >.>

Let’s talk frankly. Roller derby is a woman’s sport and I guess all of us experience my particular problem from time to time.

PERIODS.

Don’t you just love ‘em?

Back when my idea of exercise was a quick tootle up a ‘hill’ on my bike (remember, I’m from East Anglia!), my periods didn’t really bother me that much. OK, yes, they hurt like buggery when they actually happened, but that was usually only ten days out of my schedule, and I’d only be really hurting for two of those days, tops.

However, now I’ve started seriously trying to exercise, they are really getting in the way. I first started getting period pain when exercising two weeks before my last period. Those two weeks I had a strange tight feeling in my uterus, I felt absolutely shattered, and my levels of misery were beyond the scale of measurement. I was seriously getting in such state, that I was actually DELIGHTED when one morning I was awoken by literal waves of cramp that I could SEE traveling across my stomach, because it might mean that the end of the insane PMT drama had been sighted.

Needless to say, I wasn’t skating that day. An afternoon with a clipboard and the job of penalty tracking followed, and I must say my respect for the refs has come on leaps and bounds since then! Come next weekend though… I still couldn’t skate, and I’d had to take the Friday off work, because I literally couldn’t get myself upright in the morning. A few tentative days of stop-start bleeding followed, and then I had this lush week of hard training and feeling good.

But then during circuits? I got period pain.

I became a little bit of a hippy during my time at University, and was determined to test things like ‘if you don’t wash your hair for six weeks, it starts to clean itself’, and ‘it’s evil and bad to put synthetic hormones into your body’ to the limit. Well ladies and gents, I believe the expression is ‘fuck that shit’. Just like my head didn’t start sprouting shampoo follicles, my uterus still hasn’t figured out the whole endocrine thing, despite leaving my leaving it alone and drug-free for four years.

Apparently one of the first things female athletes do is go on the pill, because the performance benefits from taking it are just that extreme. I don’t want to win any gold medals, but I have set my heart upon competing in Roll Britannia. Our team colours are gold, so there’s some connection there at least.

I just personally don’t like the odds of betting that Roll Britannia will fall on the one week out of every five that I actually feel human.