This evening, for the first time in a very long time, I went ice skating.

Despite growing up in Minnesota, I can recall going ice skating on just two previous occasions. For the first(?) episode, I vaguely recall going ice skating at an arena in Brooklyn Park (or was it Brooklyn Center?) when I was very young. To be precise, I remember being in the arena, but I don’t recall the actual event of skating; the memory is merely a faint whisper.

The second time was on the frozen lake at my dad’s house. Ancillary events date this milestone to no earlier than 1992. I remember my dad snow-blowing the snow off of the ice. I remember trying to skate but not meeting with much success, and I remember that my sister was there too. After that one attempt, I don’t think I ever tried skating on the lake again. I regret not taking advantage of that opportunity, not the least reason being that I would be a much better skater now.

It is said that you are never more than 500 meters from a station on the Paris metro. I think the same is true for ice arenas in the Twin Cities, if one includes outdoor arenas. Indoor arenas are slightly more rare; they exist at a 1000-meter interval. Being that the Twin Cities has been abnormally warm this autumn, I chose to patronize the latter.

At $2.50 per session, public skating at the indoor arena was an affordable diversion. The demographics were skewed strongly towards youth; the median age was perhaps 16, but the mean age was maybe 10. I paid my admission, put on my skates, and, leaving caution to the wind, stepped on the ice.

Now, just because I haven’t ice skated much doesn’t mean that don’t know how to skate. A few years ago, I decided that I should learn how to rollerblade, so I got a pair of inline skates and, through trial and error, figured it out. I even played roller hockey in the summer of 2003. Granted, I’m not good at skating, but I’m at least skilled enough to not make a complete fool of myself. Or so I thought.

Just kidding! I didn’t make a fool of myself. Nonetheless, skating on ice was rather more difficult than skating on pavement. All of the little kids were skating circles around me; in some fairly annoying cases, they did so quite literally. My inexperience on ice and limited skating practice did little to help the situation. However, this being America, I needed a scapegoat. I found one in my skates.

I knew going into this adventure that my skates might cause me some problems. Like I mentioned in a previous post, I am going to start playing ice hockey. In fact, I start one week from today. Since I didn’t have any ice skates, I went out and bought new ones. But these are no ordinary skates. No, these are goal skates.

The important thing to note is that a goal skate is quite different from a normal hockey skate. The boot is lower on the ankle. The blade is closer to the bottom of the foot. The blade itself is longer, flatter (larger “radius”), and generally duller (larger “hollow”). Oh yeah, and it has that big white plastic cowling. All of these things combine to provide a different skating experience than one would find with a normal player hockey skate; namely, turning is harder, and it’s more difficult to go fast; these truths are what somewhat hindered me tonight. The advantages are that it is much more stable and much better suited to preventing pucks from going into the goal; these truths are why I bought the skates.

So, why goalie? Simple: it looks like fun, and I’ve wanted to do it for a while. I’m not getting any younger, so now is the time!

Yet to be seen is how my skating will be affected when the leg pads are added to the equation. If the added difficulty in walking is any indication, there will be some a significant challenge come ice time.

But, as I’m finding, life gets boring without challenges!

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On a completely unrelated (though perhaps more important) note, BonnevilleClub got press! Current Bonneville owners found this article in their latest edition of Pontiac Performance, the GM magazine for Pontiac owners. Awesome! Hat’s off to my tireless administrators and staff whose dedication and hard work continue to make the site as useful, friendly, and popular as it is. The numbers back up the claim: the forum has over 3000 users and a post count of over 280,000. Over the past 12 months, the server has transferred 270GB for BonnevilleClub. In the same time period, these users visited the site a total of 1.8 million times, creating a total hit (server access) count of 45.1 million. Wow!