Curling: the making of a future Olympian

On Friday night my friend Bobby organized for a group of us to go to a

local indoor ice rink and attend a "Learn to Curl" clinic.

At first, I was really skeptical. I'd seen curling on t.v. and, to

be quite honest, it looked like a joke.

People in sneakers shoving huge rocks across ice while others used

brooms to "sweep" it into position. I mean, SERIOUSLY?!?!

The whole "sport" was a joke, right?

But I went anyway. And I am SOOOO glad that I did.

We had such a fun night.

The evening started out with a 30 minute classroom instruction session.

And then we moved out on to the ice.

Here I am trying to move one of the stones.

Each of the stones weighed over 40 pounds!!!

Now that we were on the ice, we were taught how to put our feet in the starting block, how to use the brooms for stability when throwing your stone, and how to NOT fall over when actually throwing the stone (you wear a silicone liner on the bottom of one shoe to make it super slippery...and it works! It was extremely hard to stay on your feet when that thing was on)

After a lot of practice in form and function, we were finally let loose to put all the steps together.

Here I am pushing off out of the starting block

Here I go sliding, and forgetting to let go of the stone!

Once you let go of the stone there was almost NO chance of staying vertical!

And last, but not least, here is me after I released my stone. This is also where I spent a good portion of the evening, on my butt on the ice.

This must have been a picture of my 4th or 5th try because most of my first throws ended with me sprawled out flat on my belly across the ice.

It was SO hard, but SO fun. We laughed really hard all night long and will have some great stories to tell for a long time.

Oh...and I almost forgot. NBC-17 was there to film the whole evening. AND they will be airing the footage locally during the 2010 winter olympics. There were quite a few times that they had the camera pointed right at me, and one time particularly that I did that graceful spread eagle across the ice move. So keep your eyes peeled during the olympics, maybe you'll see me!