Breaking ankles is trendy at PRG's

We've been trying hard to launch a trend for a year, and after a couple of failed attempts (I proposed the knee, Lara Von Rapt the shoulder, High Wheels and Dixie Pixie the ribs) we are finally on the good thing with ankles: Fast and easy, just a little twist is enough to make you the proud owner of a broken bone, with a cast offered in the special package. A tempting offer which more and more Paris RollerGirls are unable to resist, to our greatest bewilderment.

The PRGs need YOU!

Wheely Wonka started it in setting the bar high, like any fashion designer who creates unique items at the greatest level of the idea.

Gigi Ell'n followed, then Marty McFight whose aquisition is almost a perfect copy of Wonka's original -- multiple fractures, surgery, cast, screws and plate, minus the torn ligament final touch; 

Then No Name Jane and Nelly Kaskou, but these two failed at breaking, they had to content themselves with sprains and did not get the cast in bonus;

Even Whisky Mamy's cat let himself be tempted with the breakage-pin-and-cast pack!

And (hopefully) last but not least, Meryl Strip-Her chose our first scrimmage of the season to switch to the dark side too!

Derby girls are not masochistic, they are just fashion victims.

...Sadly enough, this trend leads to a side-effect: we are getting undermanned.

Do not miss our 2012 recruitment workshops and enlist in the Paris RollerGirls, WE NEED YOU to fight by our side! We will feed you, love you, take care of you and train you to become perfect masochistic derbygirls.


RELATED POSTS

• First casualty under my command

School's back after summer

First day, PRG Class picture 2012-2013 -- by Sally Broyeur

 

Some sing "School's out for summer" but we'd rather sing the opposite!

It is the start of the new season and we're all excited.

Proof here with the class picture taken last week!

Don't we look cute and disciplined?

Visiting the Sac City Rollers

After our one-week stay in Vegas for the RollerCon (here and there for latecomers), we headed to California to visit longstanding friends of Karla Karschër's. One of our stops was Sacramento and we took the opportunity to go and train with the Sac City Rollers.

It was one hell of a resumption! The class was their very first of the season after the summer break, and coach Purdy Grrrl did not take it easy on us. The program was simple, though: ENDURANCE for the three quarters of the class... pacelines, single, double, clockwise, anti-clockwise... and a bit of skating and derby skills to end up with.

We made the mistake to show up with our Team France jerseys (we wanted to match a bit... yeah and show off too).

"Hey Team France, show us that blocking drill again. Girls, watch how close they work together. Team France, once more. Alright. Now one more last time, let's try with a bigger built jammer." Uuuh!

To be honest, I almost fainted and had to ask for sugar but that was fun (and purifying, given the water we lost).

Water. Air. Have you ever derbied in a sauna? Worse: have you ever had an endurance class in a sauna? Well... We did.

RollerCon '12, Las Vegas: Day Life

Last year's RollerCon was an Epic Fail for me. Remember...

This year was faaar better and I could enjoy all the facets of the event. At least the two main ones: Day life (i.e. derbying) and Night life (i.e. partying).

 This year was particularly huge. 5 to 6 thousand derbypeople in the same hotel, the Riviera down the Strip in Las Vegas. 5 days of non-stop events, on skates, off skates, on track, in pool, on dancefloor...

Off-skate workouts, conferences, on-skate classes, scrimmages and bouts constituted the day-time events and were organized in parallel in several rooms.

The off-skate part was made of workout classes and conferences on various subjects. Except for the pool workout for which the pool of the hotel was reserved (obviously), the workout classes took place at the very last floor of the Monaco Tower with a large bay window onto the city and the desert in the background. Stretching classes at 7PM with the sunset over the city were great.

FMyLife #1: Lazy leg squats

Today, in showing the next warm-up drill to the whole roller derby class:
 

"... And then, while the first half of you is doing 5 laps, the other half is doing wall squats leaning on your toe stops like that no to..." *WHAMBAM* fall.
 

I had forgotten the lazy leg parameter in a fit of enthusiasm. FML. 

Paris RollerGirls Winter '12 Open Practice

Shot: Gosh -- thegoshphotographies.blogspot.com | Art: Koz

As part of the winter recruitment wave, the Paris RollerGirls open the doors of their gym for you to have a look at what Derby is and experience what it feels like to sit in the suicide zone around the track.

In-between the two workshops to prepare for the entrance test, you can go and witness the Monday evening 3-hour training in St. Denis, just like in last september when it went like THAT.

 

Open Practice

Monday Jan. 30th, 19:00 - 22:00

Gymnase Pasteur (10 rue Pasteur 93200 St. Denis)

Metro: St. Denis Université

Paris RollerGirls Open Practice on TV

On Monday Sept. 12th, we organized an Open Practice in our "new" gym at Saint Denis, in the suburb of Paris.

I put "new" in brackets because in reality it's an old municipal gym, mainly used by the school next door, and by the local skating club during the evenings of the week. We managed to get a time slot on Monday evenings thanks to a partnership with the SDUS skating club.

This open evening was also our first official practice after the summer break. We were expecting more visitors, but it was for the best as the gym is quite small: it was crowded and sometimes the fright was worth the coming... wheels and plates were flying close! Haha.

The TV showed up and we had a nice report on CANAL+ a couple of days after. They made a cute edit, mixing footages of drills and scrimmages as well as interviews.
TF1, another national channel, came to get their bearings for an upcoming show... More information soon I hope!

Oh My GOSH !!



Gosh -- TheGoshWorld.blogspot.com

A couple of months ago, Sailor Blood came across a badass blog with badass illustrations wrapped up with badass humor. I won't bother you with all the details because this is a long story about a google search, smurfs and latex -- Yeah... long AND freaky!

Anyway, she cliks on the link to the website, browses a bit and *WhamBam* she discovers an illustration of a super-stylish rollergirl. She can't help but contacting him and inviting him to a bout. As the guy does photography too, he asks if he can take pictures of a game some time.

Exciting, hu? Even more when she discovers the story of their mail exchange two days later on the blog, with an awesome fake cover of a skating magazine staging a roller-derby bout.

You're wanting a name don't you?

He is called GOSH and he's pegging away on

The Gosh World.

We all met him yesterday at practice, at last! The encounter is related through his first set of pictures of us on his photography blog, under the title "Hey Ladies... First Try"

BCRD Advanced Bootcamp

INTRODUCTION: FATE & PLANES

Sometimes fate can be as kind as cruel.

Sometimes bad things lead to even greater things than the ones you missed.

Remember the Epic Fail of the Paris RollerGirls Vs. the Berlin Bombshells in late July? When Destiny had decided that the Air France strike would affect only one flight, THE flight. It had to be the Paris-Berlin of course. And one complication leading to another, the bout had to be cancelled (again).

Remember my Epic Rage when I learnt that I had shortened my stay in Las Vegas at the RollerCon for a cancelled bout? I was lucky that I didn't have a direct flight, and arriving in Paris I rushed into an Air France shop to change my ticket… for a trip on the 27-28 Aug. Same date as the Advanced Bootcamp run by Swede Hurt and Suzy Hotrod. An exciting perspective which lessened my frustration for having left so early. The registrations had been closed the previous week, but the camp was not sold out and I managed to get my ticket.

RollerCon 2011

MISCELLANEOUS

• 4 tracks and a huge off-skates room 
• A gigantic hotel in which you can get lost just like that (tested and approved) 
• Waiting lines to get tickets to attend workshops 
• Over-secured check-in – too bad for you if you don’t gather on time your ID, your RC pass, your Workshop ticket and your RC sticker on the left side of your helmet 
• Stickers, badges, goodies a go-go 
• A crowd of rollergirls AND rollerboys from all over the world 
• Tons of love, tons of flashy “lift-n-separate” short pants, and tons of workshops’n scrimmages all day long

The experience was very instructive, attending such a huge event, observing the organization, remembering tips and drills of the workshops I took, meeting people I didn’t know, meeting others I knew and I hadn’t seen in a while. I was there only for two days, but I tried to enjoy these 48 hrs as much as possible.

Goldfinger: PRG All Stars Vs. Crime City Rollers

Paris RollerGirls (78-91) Malmö Crime City Rollers

June 18th, 2011 / Paris

We played against the Crime City RollerGirls of Malmö...

What a game!

No surprise as for the scores. I guess we all saw it coming. We haven't been training since Stuttgart... 3 weeks's a long time! No scrimmaging, no strategy preparation, we could feel it on the track: We were not united as a team and we didn't work in couples like we're used to.

The changing of bench managers was also unsettling: Our previous manager, Justin Beat-her, had to quit because she had no more spare-time, and we tried without rehearsal to work with Ban'Anna (ref) and Wheely Wonka (gf and future awesome sk8er) who had to learn everything on the fly. Lots of tensions, pressure, and chaos on the bench -- also due to the fact that we were losing.

Actually, no. We were not losing: the game was tight. We had strong skaters in both teams, the game was exciting and with suspense. But they were far more prepared than us and far more disciplined, and they won with merits.

We could have beaten them, and we were close to take the advantage back: it was just a question of a couple of jams if we played well. We had a fatal lapse of concentration during one jam at the beginning of the second half-time, when they scored *a lot* of points. This was the turning point!

Bordeaux RollerGirls: Les Petites Morts

This week I was in Bordeaux, my hometown, to rehearse and record with my band Akouphën. I made the most in poping to Bordeaux's practices.
 

That's kind of funny because I wouldn't have moved to Paris, I would belong to that team...
 

I attended two of their practices on the docks at the hockey rink *memories*, showed them some off-skates exercises and on-skates drills. Nice!

Derby Training

Training Schedule

The Paris RollerGirls have two official trainings per week in the gym, on Saturdays and Sundays: 7 hours/week to scrimmage yeah! The ground is soft and sticky, which is quite tiring but we say to ourselves that it's just a 2-in-one training+extra work-out...

During the week we are responsible for our personal trainings (on and off skates). Now that the sunny days are back, we are meeting outside to skate together, and I must say that we see each other nearly every day now!

 

We have the incredible luck to have three amazing American Derby girls to coach us: Amelia Scareheart, Fifi Lafoe and Dixie Pixie -- Mimi, Fifi and Pipi (er--yeah...)! I feel really honored to have the priviledge to have such quality training. All the more that it's the first time I have coaches: With Freestyle, I'm used to train on my own in the streets, come rain or come shine, and coaching myself. It's a big luxurious change to have somebody behind your back to tell you to do this and that!!

 

I rarely Freestyle now. I really need a break, I came so near from being disgusted... But I still skate a lot, to go from one place to another... and I try most of the time to do it with quad skates to become more and more agile with them.

I'm having a go at street roller-dancing too, and I really like it. It's a bit like doing Freestyle but with quad skates on. New challenges, and I need to work on my upper-body... very interesting work.

As for the off-skates workout, I'm doing body training, jogging and stretching!

Why I Started Derby

My derby name is KOZMIC BRUISE, Number B612...

...and I'm proudly part of the Paris RollerGirls.

 

I dropped by about one year ago, I liked it and stayed a bit... but then we had to face a terrible but common problem for Parisian sports(wo)men, and this during a good bunch of months: no gym to train! We had to stop training during automn because wind and drizzle don't mix very well with skating...

 

Luckily enough we finally found a (provisory) gym in the near suburbs on a campus, and we could resume our trainings for good in January.

It was a second try, we lost girls on the way but new girls arrived. I came back too, more motivated than ever, after difficult automn months when I had to make an aweful decision -- quitting freestyle skating competitions because I was choking in there little by little, my passion was becoming more and more poisonous to me...

 

I clung to Derby to forget Freestyle, yes indeed, but also (and above all) because I found self-confident, amazing, improbable, and loving people coming from everywhere in the World.

This is all new to me because I never practiced a team-sport. I've always done creative individual activities (dancing, freestyling) so this is quite a new challenge and I'm really curious about it!