This is how I roll, animal print pants outta control

Spring 2004. I'm 7 years old, the weather is getting nicer and nicer and I'm seeing all the older kids on rollerskates. I had finally gotten the hang of actually moving forward on ice skates some months earlier, saw all the older kids having fun on their skates and thought that damn, it's time I get on wheels. So, my dad dug out an ancient pair of quad skates for me and off I went.
Granted, by that point inline skates were the mainstream and quad skates horribly outdated, but I was having enough fun to not care so much; I'd sometimes skate to school, and over the summer I started feeling fairly confident.

One grumpy kid sitting on the roof of her dad's ancient van.

Spring 2005. I'd gotten a pair of Puma Roller Kitty quad skates. Looking at them now, I'd call them somewhat outdated entry level derby skates at best, but in 2005 no one was laughing anymore when the quad skate kid was suddenly the fastest in the hood. My mother noticed my love for rollerskating and signed me up for a figure rollerskating club. I didn't get to train a lot with them before they went on a summer hiatus, but I did get noticed when I came third in their end-of-season competition, in the beginners' category. Over the summer, I'd rarely be seen without skates; I spent most of my days outside and use rollerskates as transportation to get around my fairly large comfort zone.

An excellent photo I snatched from this ebay listing selling the exact skates I had. My 8 year old self rates 5 stars.

June 2005, I'm a few months shy of 9. My skates are 2nd hand artistic rollerskates.

Spring 2006. I'd grown out of my precious Roller Kitties, and as the quite inconsistent and restless kid I was, I quit figure rollerskating not long after it started to actually require some concentrated effort, a decision I still sometimes wish I hadn't made. But for quite some years, I didn't touch rollerskates at all and when I rarely did, it was on some 2nd hand inline skates I didn't particularly enjoy. I did however make sure to ice skate at least a few times every winter since, which kept me from getting rusty and I even learned a couple of new tricks.

That 2012 phone camera quality.

Spring 2012. I acquired my first brand new pair of low end inline skates and put them into fairly heavy use over the summer. They served me well over two years, and in 2014 I bought a fancy pair of fast inline skates with 100mm wheels. And yet it was in summer 2014 that I got way too busy to actually take proper advantage of them, and over the years since then they've mostly been idle.

My two first Instagram posts.

Spring 2018. I look at my big, fast and fancy inline skates, their giant restrictive boots and wonder whether I should switch them out for derby skates. I dig on the internet. I look at derby skates; sure, they have very different and definitely much smaller wheels, but there's nothing restricting my movement around the ankle and it's a setup I grew into as a kid. Soon enough the temptation becomes too great to resist and I end up getting a very decent pair of entry level derby skates, set up with soft wheels and toe stops for outdoor use.

Sweet baby jesus, new rollerskates! 

I give them a couple of spins, admit that I'm a little rusty, the paths and landscapes in Fredrikstad either not quite as optimal for rollerskating as those in Tallinn, or I just don't know where to go, and so the summer passes. I see the danger of my beautiful new quad skates ending up as idle as my inlines, and I look up options to put them into good use. Again, I dig on the internet and lo and behold, there's the fresh new Fredrikstad Roller Derby club (FRD) looking for new people. In no time, I find myself skating with them every Sunday and getting better safety gear and indoor parts for my skates.

A rollerskate workshop on my lap. This quick shot I took while replacing a faulty plate that one of my derby skates came with, that I discovered when changing to a red toe stop suitable for indoor use. Thankfully, skatepro delivered and it was much less of an inconvenience than it could've been. On the table you also see a set of red indoor wheels I got 2nd hand from one of our club members.

Now, before I continue on the 4 months I've had with FRD, here's a basic summary of what roller derby is:

Roller derby is a contact sport played by two teams of five members roller skating counter-clockwise around a track. Roller derby is played by approximately 1,250 amateur leagues worldwide.

Game play consists of a series of short match-ups (jams) in which both teams designate a jammer (who wears a star on the helmet). The jammer scores points by lapping members of the opposing team. The teams attempt to hinder the opposing jammer while assisting their own jammer—in effect, playing both offense and defense simultaneously. (another excellent, more detailed but easy to chew summary of gameplay can be found here).

While the sport has its origins in the banked-track roller-skating marathons of the 1930s, Leo Seltzer and Damon Runyon are credited with evolving the sport to its competitive form. Professional roller derby quickly became popular; in 1940, more than 5 million spectators watched in about 50 American cities. In the ensuing decades, however, it predominantly became a form of sports entertainment, where theatrical elements overshadowed athleticism. Gratuitous showmanship largely ended with the sport's grassroots revival in the first decade of the 21st century. Although roller derby retains some sports entertainment qualities such as player pseudonyms and colorful uniforms, it has abandoned scripted bouts with predetermined winners.

Modern roller derby is an international sport, mostly played by amateurs. Most teams are all-female teams, but there is a growing number of male, unisex, and junior roller derby teams.

 So, this is basically where the "animal print pants" come in, even if I don't own any myself. Yet.
My first roller derby related experience was actually in either late 2016 or early 2017, when my roommate took me to an open training with Dirty River Roller Derby, the local league in Turku. It felt good to be back on quad skates, even if I was in no position to take it up back then. But now I've had an excellent time brushing the dust off my old rollerskating skills as well as learning a wide variety of new ones. Plus, rollerskating is excellent exercise for legs.

Another very fun and interesting part about joining FRD for me has been that we just started up and we're not that many. I feel like that has directly resulted in me being a whole lot more involved in the whole shebang than I ever expected to be - we have a fairly small core group of enthusiastic people and we're all doing our best to grow it into something great, and so far we seem to be doing really well.

This banner, very large in real life, was made when the club participated in Fredrikstad Pride 2018 and has since become somewhat of a slogan that we show off whenever we can. I wasn't aware of the club when looking at the happy Pride crowd, but I did notice the banner so it was really nice to recognise it again when I later joined. I very much look forward to marching the next pride under it. The slogan translates literally to "Roll with whoever you want", or as I'd prefer to put it, "Roll with whom you will".

In addition to just having a hell of a good time on my skates, I've been working on getting out the word (heck, is it news to anyone reading this that I'm a member of the club?), and I've somehow ended up in the social media team. Not long after I joined the club, I found myself trying to engineer and fashion a set of bleachers out of gingerbread (without compromising edibility) for our contribution to the local museum's gingerbread exhibition.

Our "gingerbread-ad". The banner on the left features an excellent pun, as "God Jul" means merry Christmas, while "God Hjul" means, well... "Merry wheel". I must give credit where it's due, I got that one from the amazing Duolingo Norwegian course. The english translation is quite literal and thus somewhat lame, but this was for a Norwegian audience anyway. And then there's our logo in the middle and the above banner on the right.

Another thing we're trying to work on is getting access to a training hall large enough to fit a roller derby track, and allow for some actual proper full speed skating, and hard enough floors. In the meantime, we're working closely with Oslo Roller Derby and other clubs. For example, in December we had a boot camp together and we occasionally train with them, which is always loads of fun because they have really good skaters and skating in a huge hall feels like I've been freed from a cage.

Logo tops, yay! (Logo designed by Glenn Glitter) 

Generally speaking, I seem to have found myself a great gang to do fun stuff with and the best part is that this is just the beginning. There is much more to come, more training, more challenges, more chances to shine, more fun. Yesterday we had a journalist from the local newspaper visiting our training session and I can't wait to see what that'll result in. As for now, I'm definitely gonna keep on rolling.

Oh, did some of you actually take note of the part of the summary where it said "player pseudonyms"? Alright, alright. Mine is Sweet Christabel, taken from these Nightwish lyrics (all the way down), which in turn were referencing Christabel, a poem by Samuel Taylor Coleridge. My number is 96, for the year I was born and the questionable cousin of a well-known sex position.