Whip it for Me: How Roller Derby Saved My Soul

by Sarah Bella                                                         photo by bookish  cc
 
Maybe it was when I started proudly searching my body for bruises the mornings after training. Or maybe it was when I found myself booty blocking my housemates as they passed me in the hallway. Or maybe it was when I stopped using my real name and started going by my derby alias, Bella DuBois, in every day life. But somehow roller derby went from being my new weekend hobby to what consumes every waking moment.

I got into derby because I was looking for a way to lose weight. I needed something more interesting than going to the gym, and I'd spent at least ten years thinking I was fat and hating my body. I'd heard about roller derby through a friend of a friend who played. All I knew was that it was a team sport played on old fashioned roller skates, and that the kind of women that played it were not your usual sporty types - they were pierced and tattooed alternative girls in short-shorts and fishnets.

I turned up at my first training session with the Victorian Roller Derby League with a pair of old skates I could barely stand up in, and no idea of what I was getting myself into. 

If I hadn't already told everyone I knew that I was going to be a roller girl, I probably would have given up after my first training session. Roller derby requires an incredible amount of physical fitness. New recruits train for almost a year before they get to play in a 'bout'.

My coach for the session, threw me head first into half hour endurance skates and hundreds of push-ups and sit-ups. She had a slight Mum-like quality to her, but she was mostly drill sergeant.

The roller girls were also not what I was expecting. They come in all shapes and sizes, and there's a derby position for each and every one of them. There are 6 foot Amazon women who can take out the opposition with a swing of their hips. There are tiny elfin women who skate so fast they become a blur. On that first day I was expecting to be self conscious because of my body shape, but the thing that caused me the most embarrassment was my inability to skate a lap without coughing up a lung.

Roller derby didn't used to be sol athletic. The  derby popular in the 1970s was more of a spectacle sport with staged fighting, in the vein of wrestling. The modern reincarnation of derby in Texas in 2001 is more  focussed on sportsmanship. It's still theatrical and campy, but these days it's a grass roots, amateur sport run by women, for women. The best way I've heard the game described is 'like rugby on skates without a ball'.

Within a few months, I was thinking about skating constantly. My fellow derby girls have become like a second family. I relish the theatrical side of derby - dressing up in tights and smearing war paint across my face. It took months for my body to show physical signs of the fitness I was developing, but I quite quickly started overcoming my hatred for my body regardless. Instead of thinking of myself as fat and lazy, I now appreciate not only the amazing things I can do on skates, but they way I can run for the train without losing my breath. I've stopped caring about the way my body looks and started loving it for the physical feats it can achieve. I've even started going to the gym again to get in even better shape for derby. 

A lot of people have asked me how a sport that consists of scantily clad women knocking each other over has done so much for my body image, but I think the physical and mental empowerment and confidence that derby gives women speaks for itself. It gives me an outlet to express myself that I would never normally have in my everyday life.

Sarah Bella is a a Melbourne-based freelance writer and roller derby queen, who says she is two parts procrastinatey to three parts chaser-of-shiny-things.