First Fall!

Yep, at 8:58 p.m. MST tonight I had my first unpremeditated fall, flat on my butt/back. It didn't hurt too badly -- I couldn't catch my breath for about 5 seconds, and my glasses went flying, but I crawled over and picked 'em up and got up and went on skating.

Tonight's skate was disappointing overall, though. There were a number of reasons:

• I didn't get to the rink until almost 8:15. While I didn't feel tired, I skated like I was tired. Not good. I only stayed until 9:30 and that included a Zamboni break.
  
• Friday night has a lot of teenagers, and loud music, and the regular lights are off and the colored lights and strobe are on. I had thought that would be fun, but in reality I found myself having a lot of trouble with the music and the lights, and especially the strobe. I couldn't really skate worth a darn until about 20 minutes or so after I got there, when they turned the lights on for some reason (thanks be to God!). In particular the strobe was very disorienting. I'm hoping I'll get over this, otherwise I'll never Make It Big! :-)
  
• Besides the aforementioned teenagers, there were lots of boy hockey players who liked to go whizzing past me at high speed, often only inches from me; some of them were going really fast and would actually turn in front of me because I was going so slow. I found that kind of rude and very, very distracting.
  
• The fall didn't help. It didn't hurt nearly as much as the only backward fall I had rollerblading -- on that one I whacked my head and couldn't catch my breath for about 2 minutes. This one hurt but only a bit. As I sit here my butt and back don't hurt at all, but my ribs do a little bit on my right side.
  
• I had a pain in my right foot and was skating on my inside edge on that side a lot. After thinking about it a bit, I realized my right boot was too loose. I went and tightened up the laces and it was much, much better. A good lesson.
  
• I felt very unsteady for some reason.
  

All in all it was very disappointing. Still, I knew there would be times/skates like this. I'm looking forward to Monday night when I will hopefully have fewer people to contend with and the lights will be on. I am going to Phoenix Sunday to buy skates, so hopefully I'll be working on breaking those in. That might be a bit of a challenge but at least it will be fun.