I skipped a week...but I'm baaaaack.

Total time off skates during ankle injury= 3 weeks. Not bad right? I absolutely babied my ankle and every day it got a bit better. I had to attend one skating practice in my tennis shoes and it nearly tore me part. We did tons of hitting and jumping and I really feel I am set behind because I missed it. One thing that I learned just from listening is a hing for timing hits. I need to remember or piciture myself taking her place. Not just hitting the front of her or whatever....if I picture myself taking her place, then I'm not going to miss. I hope this helps once I get back into the swing of hitting. The upside is that WS and Betty were absolutely encouraging (not a surprise, seriously) in my decisions to not skate until I felt my ankle was 100% better. At that point I couldn't even walk pain free..although I wasn't limping. This week, although I'm still experiencing pain, I strapped my skates on and started with some light skating. My girls were all so encouraging and happy to see me back on skates. More than one teammate is dealing with overcoming an ankle injury as well, so it's nice(?) to have people who relate to what I'm going through. We were in the Xcel concourse this week so we did the usual station work. This was nice, because it was lower impact than a normal Tiki practice. It was a really good first practice for me (post injury). We started with 10 laps around the concourse. Ideally WS wanted alternating 100% with 80%. I started slow- turtle slow, and kept increasing my speed on each lap. The happy shouts I got from my teammates were great. To my surprise my ankle started feeling better as I skated and picked up speed, and not worse. My teammate Bus suggested that my ankle is probably at the "heat" stage of healing...meaning warming it up really helps. I made it to 5 laps when all were done with 10. Not bad since I had started out so slow. I caught the end of stretching before we were told to line up in from most comfortable to least comfortable. This was interesting. I'm one of about 20 scrimmage ready girls (there are about 80 debs total) and I wandered over to the "least comfortable" end of the line. I knew I needed to start slow and build up my ankle strength again and I figured working on basics with the new girls was where I belonged. Low and behold there were two of my fellow ankle rehab girls down there. It was quite funny. We started with fast feet stuff. I did most of it modified and VERY controlled lest I tweak my ankle again. We then moved on to stopping. I was able to do most of this and actually did a lot more than I thought I'd be able to do at this point in my healing. I even did some turn around toe stop stops....very carefully at first. I did some snow plows...which i am thankful for. I was doing a fast hard snow plow when I hurt myself, so it was good to get "back on the horse" as they say. After that was sticky skating and a lot of pace line work. All good basic stuff all around. I iced my ankle good and took some Ibuprofen after. During the drive home I was constantly wondering if I pushed it too far and if I'd be in pain the next day. I'm here to say as of 10:34pm Monday night my ankle is no worse for the the wear. If anything the skating helped it. Bus gave me some more stretches to do over the next week or two (we have no practice Easter Sunday) and boy, I can't wait until I'm totally pain free. Practice was a win. Practice is always a win. Life is good.