The Struggle with Daily Life

I don’t have enough time to dedicate to hockey as I would like. Ehem. Let me repeat that… I attend a clinic on Tuesday evenings and try to skate both days on the weekend, but I still don’t have enough time to dedicate to hockey as I would like.

My work hours are long; nine hour days with an hour and change commuting each way. When I get home, there’s myself and another person to take care of. I have to cook dinner, clean the dishes, do my laundry, etc., all before I can park myself in front of the tv for a maximum of a half an hour before I need to go to bed. This is not mentioning that I can usually only get 6 hours of sleep a night and I don’t always get tv time.

If it were up to me, I’d be in skates daily and nightly. 

This is a new thing… The last time I was this obsessed with doing something, it was singing and I was driving on the daily so I was able to satisfy that itch. I can’t reach this one, with rinks only open until 5 pm for open skating, with teenagers crowding the space the one late night a week (Fridays). How do I make the time? How do I enable myself to reach this impossibly itchy spot? I don’t really know. I’ve even contemplated bringing my skates to work and asking my boss if I could take my lunch hour late to hit the rink for 40 minutes a day — she doesn’t like me enough to approve that though. So what do I do?

When I get the free time, usually after I’ve skated on weekends or when my boyfriend’s working late, I practice my stick handling with a tennis ball on our living room area rug. I shift from foot to foot, taking shots at the couch, all in an effort to simulate being on my skates. I’ve been completing a new workout routine with an emphasis on skating legs so that, when I’m on the ice, I can be better than I was the week before. It’s not enough though, truthfully. I’ve even contemplated searching my parents old storage space to see if I can find my inline rollerblades… Yeah, I’m that obsessed.

The flip-side of my coin is that I’m not financially able to support this dream more than I already do. $350 for 13 weeks of my Tuesday clinic, $11 dollars each open skate, $16.50 when its Sticktime… And the instructors from my clinic are $40 or $50 per HALF HOUR lesson. How do I get better on my own? 

I guess that the good news for me is that I’m getting better at all. I’ve taken this journey into my own hands and I’ll do everything I can to reach where I’d like to end up in this. Right now? I’m just hoping to be skating circles around where I currently am by this time next year.