Ice Skating is not a pastime for the fat and unfit person, such as me, with creaky knees, worn out joints and muscles that haven’t been used since childhood.
That is the conclusion I have come to after going Ice Skating last Saturday. You see, daughter the first decided yet again it would be a good idea to have another annual birthday. Why kids and women insist on having a birthday every year is beyond me!
This is not me obviously!
Because I am generally a nice bloke - and to have a quiet life - I was inclined to acquiesce to her request to go Skating. I haven’t done any form of skating, be it Ice or Roller, for roughly 14 years. That performance all those years ago, if memory serves, was diabolical – and I’m being generous here.
Before I go into rant mode and complain a lot, I want to state categorically I had a great time. Even falling over and making a complete TIT of myself was a laugh. The kids loved it, I loved it, Granddad – the kids not mine! – loved it. A great day was had by all. Well worth the aches and pains I feel now, three days later.
Now to make matters worse, both kids have never been Ice Skating. But the little buggers took to it like they were born on the Ice. The boots, albeit the hire ones made of hard plastic and guaranteed to cause much agony and foot deformations, neither hurt nor loosened for the full two and a half hours we were there, which is good. The last thing I want is some lump of crap blue plastic hurting my babies. I say babies which is a daft because they are 13 and 9 – hardly babies. But you know what I mean. Some say I’m over protective, I am, but so what – they are precious to me.
But I digress.
My skates on the other hand were crippling me from the very point of putting them on. I had the right size because the next size up was way too big. Still they hurt like hell. I tightened them as much as I could, for fear of snapping the frayed and weak-looking laces. Loosening on a regular basis was a frequent pain in the arse. This caused the skates to take on angles to the Ice that must only be reserved for severe cornering. This only exacerbated the feeling of torture. I’m not joking; these bloody boots were used in the past as instruments of torture. You could have asked me anything and I would have sung like the proverbial canary, just on the promise of relief by taking them off.
Come to think of it, the skate blades, why oh why are the crappy hard plastic ones they sadistically hand out to unsuspecting patrons, shaped so differently to shop bought ones. Most of the kids there were using their own skates. The boots looked comfortable and were made of leather. Not cutting into your legs or stopping the intricate workings of your ankle bones. The blades were slightly curved along their length and were nicely rounded at the ends. Ours were basically straight and had a saw tooth doohicky at the front. The bottom most tooth pretty much hung down in line with the blade. This is a deliberate attempt to both make you fall over a lot, much to the amusement of the kids, and to stop you getting any speed up. Speed equals stability in my book.
They are there, as I am reliable informed by one of the ‘Ice Marshalls’ (jebus were the feck do they come up with this crap?) to be a brake. This is both wrong and stupid. Much to my chagrin I discovered that, yes they do stop due to digging into the ice, but due to the rather fundamental law of inertia, you don’t. Boot stops, body carries on. Say hello to Mr. Ice all cold, wet and hard. Laughs all round. Why can’t the manufactures make the blade curved and do away with the fret saw on the front? It won’t cost anymore to press that shape out. Still it does make for plenty of laughs for everybody else.
In all honesty if the small people decide they want to go regular I might be forced to scour eBay for a decent pair of proper skates for each of us. That way, it will be somewhat less uncomfortable, easier to do and more enjoyable for me at least.
I can tick off Ice Skating as a pastime the kids like and want to do. I can also tick it off as one of the most damaging to my well being. I feel old at the best of times but waking up still feeling the effects of a bit of exercise three days later really hits home.
“Pass the Zimmer, I’m a broken man”.
