Ice-Skating

There are few sports that scare me, but ice-skating is one of them. I’ve only been ice-skating a few times in my life, but every time I do, my fears resurface. My first fear is that a skate blade, whether my own or someone else’s, will somehow make contact with my jugular or my stomach or some other vital part of my body. I’m not all that great at keeping my balance while standing on top of two very thin pieces of metal, and I often imagine myself falling on top of or sliding into said thin pieces of metal.

My second fear is that I won’t be able to stop when I need to. I can’t just lean my foot forward and push a brake against the ground, like roller-skating. When I start ice-skating too fast for my comfort, I typically attempt to grab onto the rink wall, effectively giving myself whiplash and further compounding my fear of ice-skating and speed. The other option is to ease my body down low enough to the ground that I can “fall” and “slide” and not injure myself, but, as I’ve already stated, then I have to worry about random skate blades slashing my skin open.

My third fear is that I’ll fall through the ice. Interestingly enough, I’ve never actually been skating on a body of water where I would need to worry about that. But that doesn’t decrease my fear any. The fact is: I’m on ice and ice is made of water, therefore leaving the possibility that some of the bottom ice has melted and created its own body of water. There’s probably no way I’d ever try to skate on a lake or pond. Doesn’t make much sense to me that any human would wear something on his or her feet that slowly whittles away the thin layer of ice between him or her and the freezing water and the starving fish (and horrid sea monsters).

My fourth and final fear is that if I find myself actually enjoying ice-skating, that I will eventually have to begin wearing skin-tight, spandex-thin, sparkly costumes in order to continue to enjoy it (much like bicyclists all have to wear the tight, shorty-shorts and expensive sunglasses). I don’t have a problem wearing something like that, but I’m willing to bet that everyone else around me would.

It takes some real guts to take up the sport of ice-skating. Seriously, the way some of those figure skaters twirl and spin and flip, a person has to have an iron gut not to puke in the middle of all of that. I can barely stand Colossus’ double loop at Lagoon; I don’t know how anyone doesn’t get all woozy after turning him or herself into a human top.

I have two nieces, one three and the other almost six, who are world-class ice-skaters (according to their parents), and I’m convinced that they are simply too naïve or foolhardy to know the dangers of ice-skating as I have detailed previously. That’s okay, though, because one of my little life-philosophies is that we can all learn from our mistakes, and it’s only a matter of time before my nieces realize why their big uncle Gabe refuses to stray more than two feet from the rink wall and won’t go faster than 2 m.p.h.