The safest place is the edge.
And by edge, I mean the 3/16’’ cut of steel used by skaters to glide, bite, and turn on ice. But that narrow cut of steel isn’t the actual edge, just the blade. The actual edge is carved out from that blade by radial cutting tools into what is known as a “hollow,'“ which when done properly, leaves just the tiniest of actual edges that skaters use as their only means of propulsion.
Yes, I said edges. As in plural. There are a pair of edges on each blade with a curved space in between. That’s it. This tiny margin allows us to hot-wire the laws of physics and score a goal or prevent one from being scored. Fortunately, being a hockey player doesn’t demand expertise in Newtonian mechanics, but it does demand comfort on that edge.
The thing that stays with me all these years from Mighty Ducks hockey camp is the relationship I found with that edge. Coach White would yell at us nonstop ‘to lean into our edge.’ To use it. He devoted the majority of our training to drills designed to help increase our comfort with the edge by encouraging us to exaggerate the essential motions involved in skating to absurd levels. Eventually, by repetition of these hilarious methods, we began to trust it. And as a byproduct, lose our fear of it.
The funny thing about our need for safety - at least in terms of ice hockey - is that it is a contradiction in nature. If you lean back (which every instinct in you wants to do) and flatten out and not use those edges, you are less secure, more prone to fall, and can be pushed around with little or no foundation; in short, security vanishes by our need to feel secure. But when you dig into the edge, like a climber does their harness, or a rider their saddle, a golfer her club, something happens.
And that something is magic. You start to feel one with it.
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