Skate Camp: Days 3 & 4

The camp is going well, but I'm so tired from all the physical activity that it's all I can do to stay awake right now. Yesterday morning it rained, so we stayed indoors and skated the dry arena at the recreation centre. The surface was incredibly smooth, like skating on ice--a flatlander's paradise. Everyone was going around in a circle as if it were a big roller rink, with perhaps a little more chaos than one usually finds in such places.

Yesterday afternoon, the weather cleared, so we went to an outdoor park that I found to be a lot of fun. On the way back, the noise in the bus was deafening. The kid sitting next to me decided to take a tour of the floor of the bus, and he resurfaced with may trophies: gum, pennies, life savers and a drinking straw, all stuck to his T-shirt as if it were some kind of modern art canvas.

Today we had great weather: sunny and cool. We went to a large park in Mississauga where the Zed team had a good time "riding the lines" as Spade-zz likes to say. Just like a little kid, I spent my bus money on ice cream, so after returning with the others to the rec centre, I ended up skating back downtown with one of the other instructors. He's a really good skater, and thought nothing about navigating the giant hill that links upper and lower Steeltown. He just jumped off the sidewalk and into one of the traffic lanes and sped down the hill while the cars whizzed by beside him.

I was much too frightened to take the hill, so I walked it until the very bottom, where a stoplight gave me the run of the road for a few moments. Part of my brain says that I could have done the hill, if only I hadn't been such a chicken, but the other part of my brain knows that I could have also easily gotten killed trying, and thrills like that just aren't my cup of tea. Still, it was impressive to see the other instructor do it, and I think he was pretty much in control the whole time, while I would have been flying by the seat of my pants.