I wrote this for Dirty Bristow magazine. It's in issue 2, called 'Beast'.

Most of the time as an adult woman with two children, when you tell people you rollerskate they laugh and then automatically tend to imagine glitter and 80's roller discos and leotards. Either that or they picture you careering down a hill as a child hanging off your sister's bike, wearing a set of four wheels on each of your feet that are precariously attached with tiny straps of leather. And probably falling down and scraping your knee, because that's most people's experience of basic rollerskating.

Rollerskating doesn't have a very hard image. Or at least it didn't, but I think that's changing increasingly and rapidly. Suddenly the fastest growing sport in the UK is the sport I play and it's rollerskating but not as you know it. The kind of rollerskating I do involves wearing a mouth guard, knee pads, elbow guards, wrist guards and a helmet. And that's not wimpy over-caution, it's what is expected and legal in order for you to get on the track. Referrees come and check your safety equipment before you start skating and people who remove their mouthguards on the track are instantly sent off.

At the last bout I played in one skater broke her ankle in three places and one girl broke her finger. The girl who broke her finger was just warming up and hadn't even begun to skate against the other team. At the last bout I played in I was so nervous as I approached the start line that I was crying and I don't cry very easily. (Well I do, but only about terribly sad things like footage on wildlife programmes of baby elephants who have become separated from their Mother and are following the herd's tracks but devastatingly, the wrong way). I don't generally tend to cry about pain, or confrontation and I am not a nervous person. I'm also not the sort to choose a full contact sport, I don't even much like touching people I don't know and I don't mean that in a rude way, but I came to skating in a roundabout way.

It started with the lethargy of cyberspace, posting, circa 2006 in the vaguely Gothic internet teenspace known as Livejournal, not, I hasten to add because I was either Gothic or teen, but it was in the youthful days of the internet when sometimes you could find quite sensible adult people in strange, slightly inappropriate spaces. A rather intelligent 30-something woman from Chicago also used to post there and she skated for a Roller Derby team called Windy City. I followed her blog and accidentally fell in love with the idea of the sport and the sort of 'infinitely cooler than the suicide girls' type women who appeared to frequent it. After a year or so of reading about it I did a bit of searching for a UK Roller Derby team and discovered the Birmingham Blitz Dames. I found a flyer. I looked at their website. I had fuzzy little daydreams where I imagined myself belting round a Roller Derby track generally being awesome in roller skates, I saw myself being a brilliant roller girl, knocking women flying here and there, Queen of the rink. But I was too scared to actually contact them. These women were seriously cool, intelligent, hard and no-nonsense. I would never have fitted in.

I'd just like to say at this point that I was never picked last at school for games or anything. It would be cool to tell you that I was the kid who was never chosen, but it's not true. I was pretty good at sports actually, used to run fast and for a long time, played Left Half at Hockey, Wing Attack at Netball. But that was a long time ago and then I had a child, got out of the sporting habit. Of course I ponced around at Ashtanga yoga a little bit pretending I had all the gen on the Ujai breath (it's a bit like pretending to be Darth Vader, that's all you really need to know) and I went to the gym under sufferance occasionally. But I wasn't 'sporty' and I certainly wasn't cool enough to be a rollergirl.

Then one day my boyfriend went to the Chamber of Commerce for one of those 'setting up your new business' courses and the Blitz Dames were there learning all about how to run their league finances properly. He told them I was wussing out about joining and they basically ordered me down to a newbie practice.
So I went. I don't know how to explain now what it was like. It's all the clichés – I never looked back, it's my reason for living and this is why; they say that everybody needs a 'third place'. You have home, you have work and you should also have a third place which ideally has nothing to do with the first two. Your third place is supposed to be the space that you can truly be yourself and yet have nothing expected of you or demanded of you. I'd read that, heard about it, but I never used to believe it. I didn't think I needed a space away from home or work, even though my home and work blend into one because I work from home as a Designer Maker with my boyfriend. I didn't think I needed any extraneous activity, and then I took up Derby.

Skating on the derby track is the only place that I have truly ever just been myself; that in the moment, visceral being-ness that comes with absolute physical exertion, with pushing yourself to the limit, with the threat of injury at any moment unless your whole mind is focussed on exactly what you should be doing.

Derby is the kind of game that takes away all your boundaries. It engulfs you, it completely obsesses you and it allows you to be who you really are without having to apologise, to temper your behaviour or in some way fit in with a pre-determined stereotype of 'woman'. In Roller Derby you create your own alter-ego. You choose a name and you skate under that name, rollergirls have names with words in like 'Fierce' and 'Killer'. 'Bitter' and 'Vortex'. 'Helen Fury', 'Violet Attack'. Where else can a woman do that? It's not just a mental thing, Derby accepts and actually needs all sorts of shapes and sizes of women; some of the best skaters both here and in the U.S are not average size. There are skinny, tall, fat, short, big boobed, tiny boobed...every type of physical woman is represented. You can look round the derby community and you can make no stereotypical judgement. You see only one constant and that's commitment.

For me the derby love manifested itself instantly, the week after my first practice I bought skates and all the safety gear and then I attended every single practice available to me from that point onwards. I passed my basic skills and became an intermediate skater, I learned how to bout. I learned how to hit and be hit safely, how to knock people down, how to stay up, how to skate fast and hard and long (to the point where you're retching as your skating because you're so knackered and all you want to do collapse on the floor) and finally, after a year and a half of three practices a week, I made the travel team.


In learning this sport I have hurt my knee, my neck, my ankle, I've had rink rash more times than I can remember (rink rash, for the uninitiated, is a certain kind of amazing diamond-patterned bruise which comes from falling very hard and skidding along the floor in fishnet tights). I've knocked someone down so far they skidded out the door, I've knocked someone into the wall. I've not done any of it maliciously or because I didn't like the opposing skater, I've done it because it's my job as a blocker to get the opponents blockers out of the way of my jammer.

It is the greatest female sport ever invented and it soothes my soul. It melts my heart like a brand new lover and I am devoted to it. There is something about it which takes over your brain and it becomes all you can think about. Normal everyday women, hardworking ordinary women suddenly start behaving like teenage boys consuming porn; hunting all over the internet for rollerderby blogs, perving over wheels and stoppers on derby shopping sites. Women who never dreamed of talking technical suddenly converse with great knowledge on the subject of wheel hardness, or the best way to clean bearings. It's like it takes over your mind. Small, neat and elegant women become hellish, violent whirlwinds on the track, women who have never confronted anyone in their lives suddenly begin to paint skulls on their faces and channel their years of pent-up anger into being the best blocker in the league. You can sit at work all day and hate your life, be resentful of other people, have no channel for your anger. Or you could take up a sport. My sport is Roller Derby, and it allows women to be furious and brilliant, to skate vigorously and to win. It turns the taboo into the celebrated. It champions bruises.


I know a skater called Rip Lashes. She is a tiny person, delicate and perfect. Kind. One day at work she was trying to recruit people for the Blitz Dames when one of her colleagues asked if there were any other Roller teams in Birmingham.

"Sure," Lashes said, "There's one more." So her colleague said, jokingly, "Oh I might join them then." And Lashes replied with total certainty, "If you do I will find you on the track AND I WILL TAKE YOU DOWN." Utterly serious, shocking herself.


I know a lot of women who say they do not have a violent side. I say get on the track and bring it on. But I would, wouldn't I?


Because my name is Izzy Dauntless. And I am a rollergirl.





Blitz Dames