marka

Howdy, So, the "outside edge single foot hockey stop" thing is an example I can directly relate to. I can't do that. I've been working at it for a little while now. I've been skating / playing on the average 4-ish days a week for a year. I would be very, VERY surprised if this is an issue of strength, vs. one of technique. Strength / endurance might affect the 5th stop in a row, but I can't imagine that its an issue for the first one. I'm not saying that some leg / ankle / whatever strength isn't required to skate. Clearly it is. What I am saying is that I think that's maybe 5% of the puzzle at absolute best and its relatively easy for anyone to get the necessary strength to make the various skating moves work in a non-endurance / repetitive scenario. Mark

Howdy, Yeah, I need to a dryland area setup at home. I've been slacking on some projects that have to get done to get area in the garage free'd up for that. One of the other main areas I've been working on lately though is positioning... I.e. getting to where I'm going to need to be. That seems to be coming from games vs. anything else really. Plus games are fun, so I'm not going to be giving them up any time soon, even if I might add some hours of dryland practice to my weeks. :-) Mark

Howdy, I wrote this up for a group of friends from college, and though it fit here too. To make it make more sense... I live in Youngstown, OH near Pittsburgh, PA. Cranberry and Beaver County are suburbs of Pittsburgh, between Pittsburgh and Youngstown. Boardman is a suburb of Youngstown, a couple miles from where we live. Laura == my wife, Dominic == my son. :-) ----------------------------------------------------- So, a bit over a year into this "Let's play hockey for real" thing. Jan 2016 was my first Adult Skills class. One of my goals this time last year was to be on a league team. I've certainly accomplished that... I'm currently on three teams. One is the Scrubstitutes, playing in Cranberry at Baierl Ice Complex on a D1 team (about halfway in skill... They have B, C, D1, D2, and E from most to least skilled. E is full on beginner. B is "probably played Juniors or real college"-ish). Another is 'Yellow', a D level team (same approach as Baierl, except there's no division in D) that plays at Brady's run in Beaver County. Its a core group of friends/coworkers from the Air National Guard base in Pittsburgh, plus fill in folks like me. The last is Valley Insurance, a B level team (only A and B, B is the lesser skilled group) that plays close to home in Boardman Ohio. I also play in a regular old guy pickup group run by a guy named Debiec when I can, plus take an Adult Skills class (that same one I started with) with Laura. Debiec was the first group I started playing with, back in Feb/March of last year. Its a really good group of older (average age is 50+, I'm pretty sure) guys. Skill level is fairly mixed and its pickup where there's no refs, no score, etc. and if you're lesser skilled there's a reasonable chance the other guy who's way better than you will hang back a bit and give you a chance, but they still expect you to try hard, do as well as you can, etc. Teams aren't totally fixed, but they're fairly consistent with only a couple guys that switch from White to Dark and most folks staying one or the other. The best guys here are both skilled and fast, but they need to hang back and "play down" to fit in with the group so you don't run into that as much. On the lower end, you have folks where I was when I started or even slightly lower. These days I seem to fit in decently well here. I'm probably slightly below average in skill... Good enough that people don't hang back when they play me and my teammates expect me to do the right thing, bad enough that I'm in no danger of being asked to play down some. :-) I really enjoy playing with these guys mostly from the social aspect, since I know them more, plus its local. On the negative side, no refs means no faceoffs and faceoffs are fun, plus no scoreboard means you don't have that amped up "close game" thing as much. Valley Insurance is my newest league team, just started four games ago or so. Skill level here is also very mixed, ranging from a guy that just about can't skate (literally) to some of the upper level (but not "has to play down a lot") guys from Debiec. This is mostly because there are only two levels locally since Youngstown doesn't have the hockey population base that Pittsburgh does, so either you're good enough for "A" or you're not. On this team I would say I'm solidly average / perhaps a bit better than average. Our team is also undefeated at four games into the season, though all of the games were within a goal or two and have been good games. This leauge also has a 'real' score keeper with a clock that stops (everyone else I play with has a running clock), some record of player stats, etc. Been having fun here too. I talked a local friend into playing on the team, plus know some of the other guys from Debiec, run into them locally at stick 'n puck or whatever, etc. Justin, the local friend above, is the guy who took the Adult Skills class with me at RMU last January. Next on the skill level and "physical closeness" level is the Yellow team at Brady. Skill here is a pretty good match for me and I'm solidly average again, perhaps just a bit below average. Upper end of the skills isn't really higher than the B league in Youngstown, but you don't have the guys that can't skate / are just starting out, so the range of skill is compressed. This is my 2nd session with them. Another good group (I've really yet to run into anyone in adult hockey that I don't like). Last game our regular center was out and they asked me to play center (usually I play winger) and had some nice comments on how my game has improved, so that was a good ego boost. However, our team is mostly in the basement in league standings, so small blessings or whatever. Lately we tend to not win the close games, which is frustrating. Top skill level is the team I played with last night. "Yellow" again (all three league teams I play on happen to have yellow jerseys!), in the D1 group at Baierl. In this group, I'm the worst player. Skill level is still fairly compressed like with the D league at Brady, but the range is slid upwards. This is my first session with them and I'm not sure if I'll be asked back or not. I'm not awful in comparison to the group (there's another one or two guys that are similar to me, though I'd rate myself as slightly worse), but I'm clearly the "most likely guy on our team to turn the fucking puck over or miss play something". Its both nice to be in a "stretch" group like this and demoralizing at the same time. Our team seems to be solidly in the mix in terms of the other teams in the league... If we have a good game we'll likely win and if we aren't clicking we'll likely lose. Last night was a 3/3 tie that we won in an overtime shootout. The Adult skills class has been fun. I did that for two or three sessions when I started, like I mentioned. Then they stopped offering it over the summer break and I was doing other stuff. I started back up again this Jan, with a year under my belt. I did it again with a weird mix of "I want to show how much better I am than I was" coupled with "I want more hockey practice, vs. games". The class is a full hour away at the RMU Island Sports Complex at Nevile Island, plus its probably the most expensive thing I do in terms of "cost to be out there". But I like the instruction and "I can try things and not worry about failing" part of it. They split the group into Novice and Veteran. Novice is REALLY novice, with everyone able to skate forward and probably hockey stop at least a little one way, but that's about it as a floor. Veteran has more skill, but still you're talking "veteran beginners" vs. "guys that used to play in high school" or whatever. Going to my first one of this year, I was really ready to show just how much I'd learned and while I was obviously better, I also still sucked. :-) Still, there's no question I've gone from "average in the novice group" to "solidly above average in the veteran group". For the 2nd session of the RMU class, Laura is taking it with me. So the three of us head down there on Sunday nights, Laura and I go out and take the class, and Dominic hangs out on the bleachers playing games or watching Youtube or whatever. Its like roll reversal for the normal way stuff is done. :-) Laura has been having fun with it. She's been in the novice group and doing ok I think. Getting better at skating, etc. She was surprised to discover that she likes the puck handling / passing / shooting "hockey skills" part as much or more than the "power skating" part. The only downside for her is that (like nearly all Adult Hockey) its at 8pm and we don't get home until 10:30pm or 11pm or so. That's late for both her and Dominic, particularly on a school night, and it bothers her. Because of that, we don't stay for the scrimmage that happens for the last 40 minutes or so of class which is really too bad, because it would be a good way for her to see if she liked playing in a game. But that would mean getting home more like 11:30pm and she just refuses. Speaking of Dominic... We started off this season with him playing in a house league at Brady. He REALLY wanted to play in goal, so we got him setup, he did a week long goalie camp over the summer, etc. He wanted me to help coach, so I got certified and inspected and all that and was helping out. The house league is lower level than travel hockey, but its still kids that have been playing a while in some cases, still serious, etc. It never clicked with Dominic. You could see that he wasn't having that much fun. He played one "real" game, a scrimmage against another local group, and they got shellacked, something like 14 to 0. Dominic played goal the whole time and kept trying, but that game was NOT good for him. He probably let in 7 or so goals he really should have stopped, but the others were because the other team was just flat out better and the game was 80% of the time or more in our defensive zone. A month or maybe a bit more in and he was complaining about going to practice, saying he wished he wasn't playing, etc. We'd gone through something like this with baseball, and because he made a commitment to the team we made him stick it out (and then did it again the next year, after he decided to sign up and try it again, a decision that still baffles Laura and I). The result of the baseball thing is that now he HATES baseball and I seriously doubt he'll ever want to even throw a ball around. I didn't want that same thing with skating / hockey, but also didn't want it to be a "no big deal, just quit" thing either. So I came up with the idea of him spending the same time he spent playing hockey on "Dad School". I.e. he'd need to do six hours of whatever schoolwork-y stuff I picked every week. I offered him that choice and with almost no hesitation, he jumped at it. Fast forward that a few months, and Dad School was going reasonably well. Not much complaining about needing to do it, its let us work on some stuff like having my dad (former highschool math teacher) work on math with him, I used it to get him reading some books I liked as a kid (Harper Hall trilogy), etc. Meanwhile the local guy who put together the Youngstown league added a local kids program Also, since I'd been in this for a year and I'm me, I had a bunch of hockey gear I no longer used that I wanted to sell. When I put that stuff up for sale, I included a bunch of Dominic's gear, including all his goalie gear. Dominic wasn't too happy about me selling his gear. I sold some of it (the smaller of two sets of leg pads, the old catch glove he started with, goalie pants, goalie cup, etc.) He really didn't like that, and I think it started him thinking about using it more. Add to that the new local group and suddenly he wanted to try that again. :-) So now we've cut Dad School back to three hours a week along with a weekly kids skills class Saturday morning. They play cross ice on one half of the ice while a bunch of us local adult players do a stick/puck/pickup thing on the other half. He's gone twice now and seems to be liking it so far. We've talked about him (probably with me and Laura) also doing a skating class on Wednesday nights and if that happens, that'll eliminate all of the Dad School requirements. That's clearly a motivating factor for him, but this is still a step back towards interest, which makes me happy. This time around, I'm going to try and make sure he demonstrates/proves more interest before we jump into a more serious program. Anyway, back to me... I sorta described my state of the world above, but didn't talk about improvement much... I seem to be transitioning at least some from "any time I'm out there, I have a good time" to "I have to do well or I'm pissed". I'm not sure that's entirely a good thing, but I also get pretty jazzed when I feel like I contribute to a hard fought win, etc. Playing with the D1 group can be / frequently is demoralizing but equally I think I likely learn more there. Sometimes I wish I was also still playing with an E league group, so that I didn't feel like I suck all the time. Objectively, I'm certainly better than I was, but I'm wondering how much of that was getting through the step part of the learning curve in the first few months and now I'm on a shallow incline / flat area. When I think about where I was a year ago, I'm better in every way. But when I think about where I was 3 months ago or 6 months ago... Less sure I'm significantly better. One of my weaknesses is stick handling... I'm just not that great at controlling the puck under pressure. I also occasionally feel flat footed / stuck and unable to quickly put myself in the right place on the ice. I do think my situational awareness has gotten a little better lately, but this is also still a place I struggle, since a lot of it is "control the puck more unconsciously, so that you have more mental capacity to see what's happening around you and make a good play". That's especially noticeable with the D1 league because there's less time before someone is on you, but it exists in every group. My goals when I started were to have fun, get in shape, and get better. Certainly those are being met at this point. But me being me, I'm not happy unless I'm the best guy out there in whatever I think of as a "good" league... Since so far "good league" seems to mean "one where I'm one of the worst players", that's certainly setting myself up for failure. :-) Its clear that given starting hockey at age 46 I will likely never have the same skills as another guy that's my age but has been playing his whole life. But its unclear if with work I can get close enough that its good enough for me. So far, I'm seeing improvement and I want to keep trying. ---------------------------------- Mark

Howdy, 7dm2 or the original? Either way, that should be a nice upgrade. :-) What're you you using lens-wise? I've been thinking I should dust off the photo gear and see how I could do. I expect getting exposures right is a challenge with so much white & the fast motion... Mark

Howdy, That's really no better than the other guy that can't let it go. Some people are assholes. Ignore them. Mark (and yeah, sometimes I break my own rule too. :-)

Howdy, WTF. NHL.TV isn't streaming the all star skills competition or game. At least NBC is apparently broadcasting the game, but still... WTF? Mark

Howdy, Yeah, I've done the normal reset your location stuff. Also confirmed that the NHL.tv app worked without the Yonder DNS servers in place. No dice. Only thing I haven't tried is doing it from a PC instead of my xbox one. Mark

Howdy, Grrrr. NHL.TV and Yonder appear to be annoyed with each other. I really wanted to watch some hockey tonight, not play network engineer. :-( Blackouts suck. Mark

Howdy, I liked the 1st season. Hopefully someone will post up how to watch it from the US / they'll release it to Netflix or whatever. Mark

Howdy, So, I've been searching a bit and not coming up with many (any?) NHL or other "I play hockey at a high level" people using FBV... Are there some and I'm just not seeing them? Mark

Howdy, So, tried FBV for the first time. I was kicking around between 1/2" and 3/8" ROH, settling on 7/16" for the last while. I went with the 95/75 FBV profile. Fairly impressed! Even with my relative newness to the game, I can feel the difference in glide. My skate doesn't seem as "sticky" on my non-push foot. And at the same time, I seem to have as much or perhaps even a touch more edge grip when turning. Skates don't seem to dig in quite as much when stopping, at least initially, but if I consciously bend my ankle to dig them in more, that seems to work. Been out on them for two games now and the other thing that's interesting is that the edge grip doesn't seem to have changed at all over that time. So far at least, I'm a convert. I've heard that when they get dull its a little more of a "falling off a cliff" kinda thing vs. the gradual dulling I've experienced with standard ROH sharpening. We'll see how that goes. Right now I'm planning on trying to get around 5-ish ice-hours on a set of blades before sharpening, but no real clue if that's aggressive, reasonable, or too conservative. One thing that's interesting is just how flat the blade looks. All the drawings you see online are so exaggerated that I wasn't really prepared for just how completely flat / featureless the edge is, but it makes sense when you think that the last number of 75 is a height difference of only .00075"! :-) Mark

Howdy, Yeah, yesterday when I posted they had both 7/7.5 and 8/8.5, but I see they're out now. I was pretty happy to see them, as I hadn't found normal steel anywhere in the 7/7.5 size. Mark

Howdy, I _think_ this is a pretty good deal for Mako folks? CXN holder w/runner for $30, plus 25% off at HockeyMonkey. http://www.hockeymonkey.com/catalog/product/view/id/140459 Mark

Howdy, My time at the local rink tonight would have made a great advertisement for Sparx. :-) Local rink guy I'm friendly with (and remain so) sharpened my skates but edges were _way_ off. Like, very easily visible to the eye. He didn't see it before he gave them back. Not adversarial and he was kinda embarrassed when I pointed it out. Then he tried to cut them again, without much better results. During this whole process, it was clear that he could do the job when everything worked right, but didn't have enough experience to recognize/fix other problems. He's a nice guy (I'd say "kid", but he's probably in his 30's, so that mostly shows that I'm old I think... :-) and wanted to do the right thing, but just didn't have the experience / knowledge. My guess is that something was wonky with the holder but ?? Anyway, making a long story short, my skates are still up there and the old guy that knows more will cut them tomorrow. On most levels, no harm, no foul. Sure a little steel is gonna be gone that really shouldn't be, but hey whatever. But I'm still wishing I had my own sharpener (absent that whole $900 to buy one thing :-). Mark

Howdy, Anyone used either of these? I wouldn't mind owning an edge height checker, but $100 for a BR100 seems a little silly after having used one at the local rink. Mark

Howdy, Kicked in the head by a student in the classroom? WTH? Mark

Howdy, I don't have the experience lots of you guys do, but I really like the Warrior Pro bag I ended up with after going through a couple cheap used bags. The only thing I'd change on it would be to change the straight zipper through the middle to a "flap" style top opening. Mark

Howdy, Is there a reason the skate clamp can't be wider, if mildly bent blades are a common problem? Mark

Howdy, Interesting. I'll give it a shot. I tried one of these at my last old guy hockey: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00GF28UFO/ref=oh_aui_detailpage_o04_s00?ie=UTF8&psc=1 It "worked" in the sense that I had way less sweat issues but after having it on for a while it felt like someone was driving an icepick into my head. Just too much pressure. I may try adjusting my helmet even bigger (I put it out another notch-ish) and give it another go, but I think the real answer is contacts. Mark

Howdy, Re: bent blades, wouldn't a sufficiently stiff clamp fix this, at least in terms of keeping the center of the stone in the center of the blade? My only real experience with this was buying some used skates for my son. The monkey at the Play it Again store "sharpened" them before I talked with him (he wouldn't have had the chance after I talked with him, given that he didn't have any idea what radius of hollow he was using or anything else beyond "my manager sets the machine up every now and then and tells us not to adjust anything". lol!) Anyway, in addition to other issues, the blade was bent a bit and that made the poor sharpening even worse. To fix this, I removed the steel and then basically just played with various shims and pressure on the blade on the bench until it was "more straight" (I would be quite surprised if it were _actually_ straight to the thousandth or whatever). Then I got my local rink guy to sharpen it and it came out looking & skating reasonable. Anyway, through that I learned that at least those blades moved fairly easily. I would assume that most subtle bends could fairly easily be eliminated _during the sharpening process_ by a sufficiently stiff blade clamp. And that should produce good edges, even if when you remove it from the blade clamp the bend comes right back. Somewhat related assumption, my guess is that as long as the edges are consistent, a minor bend in a blade isn't going to be noticeable when you're skating. Curious about your thoughts though! Mark

Howdy, LOL. Don't be. There's every chance that I don't mind the sharpenings I get because I suck enough not to notice any issues.... :-) Seriously, I've had a couple bad sharpenings and yeah that sucked. So I'm a little more careful about who sharpens my stuff and I eyeball it some when I pick it up to look for really bad problems. I also use standard sharpenings vs. FBV or whatever... If I wanted to use FBV / Fire then a Sparx would make more sense for my situation. Mark

Howdy, For me, the Sparx machine seems like a great thing for those who need or want it, but I have to assume there are a hell of a lot of folks like me out there and I'm pretty firmly in the camp of "I'm reasonably happy with most sharpenings I get and I can pay for a hell of a lot of $6 sharpenings before I get to the cost to buy and maintain a Sparx machine". Mark

Howdy, Yeah, I do the shampoo thing now and that for sure helps with fogging. But I think it works by causing the fog to condense. Add in some sweat and there's frequently a layer of "liquid-y" stuff that still fucks with vision (but not quite as bad as actual fog. I tried a forehead sweatband thing, and it added way too much pressure to my forehead. How do you use the tennis sweatbands? Mark

Howdy, Speaking of sticks btw, I'm going to try out one of these "two year old top end" sticks... Had a $40 credit at HockeyMonkey, coupled with Warrior QR1's being on sale for $140 and 25% off... Ended up being ~$65 out of pocket and I couldn't say no. :-) Should be here next week. Mark

Howdy, So, haven't done one of these in a while... The executive summary of my current issue with hockey is "Look, _then_ pass". My skills are still increasing, most notably I handle the puck better now than before. Shots are still pretty "meh". Getting better at receiving imperfect passes with my skates. Getting a little stronger in terms of skating. Etc. But my Achilles heel right now is that I'll get the puck / go get the puck and then make some stupid "pass to where I apparently think someone should be", without actually looking well. And of course, 95% of the time, that ends up being a turnover. Which sucks for everyone. So now, before I go out on a shift my mantra is going to be "Look, then pass". My son's hockey is going reasonably well. He's in a house league about 30 minutes away at another rink (the local rink only has travel hockey and they didn't have room for a goalie. The house league seems a little better in intensity as well. I'm helping coach. That's been going ok. The head coach is a good guy and I think I've been helping. My son has been having fun too, it seems like. He doesn't like it as much as soccer, but he still says he has fun. Lately he's been wanting to skate out vs. being in goal, but this week he'll be back to getting into the net. He may have his first game every next weekend if it gets put together and he'll be in goal. That could be interesting. Hopefully he'll have fun with it. The house league itself has been interesting due to the mix of players. Being a house league, the ages are way more mixed than normal kid hockey... There are four or so Squirts (10 and under), 5 or 6 PeeWees (12 and under), and 5 or 6 Bantams (14 and under). I think I've got those names right btw. USA Hockey smartly is going to names like 10U, 12U, 14U, etc. to account for this "WTF? I haven't been doing this for 100 years" issue, but its not there yet. Anyway, before the first practice I'm standing there with my son (in his goalie stuff) getting ready to head out on the ice with the rest of the kids and one of the older kids is standing next to me. And he's my height, with a stick as tall as the one I use. And I realize that this kid with the same leverage as me is going to possibly be shooting pucks at my 9 year old and I'm like "Uh.... I'm not so sure about this!" :-) Luckily, being a house league none of these kids really seem able to fire rockets. Probably I shouldn't have worried though... Yesterday at a local practice with him I ended up glancing a shot off his head. :-) He was fine. Mostly just surprised both of us, no damage. Equipment wise for me, coming up on a year doing this I think the biggest surprise is just how consumable stuff is. My gloves are starting to get holes in the palm of my top hand. The skates I used since Jan of last year until just recently were wore holes into the top of the inside liner. The stick I've liked the best for the last while I noticed today has the toe split. Etc. Couple that with me getting used to what I like and I don't think I'm still using _any_ equipment I started with. My next piece of equipment is going to be contact lenses. Playing with glasses sucks. And contacts are essentially free with vision insurance, vs. surgery which is like $3.5k or whatever. So, going to try contacts when I'm playing hockey. Not expecting them to work well with computer screens (I tried this once before like 20+ years ago) due to my astigmatism, but we'll see. Anyway, turns out vision matters and blurred vision due to sweat on glasses / glasses falling down your head inside your helmet is not a benefit. Anyway, that's way long enough. So yeah... Still hockey-ing. Mark