3000 years before Christ was born someone in Switzerland decided to schenkel. Schenkel is Dutch for skate, however, actually means leg bone – which is what was used to craft the first pair of ice skates. Leg bone with leather straps. Over time, the ice skate transformed from bone to wood with a metal blade on the bottom.
From that point forward, people started getting crazy on the glaciarium (translation: refrigerated ice rink) – doing all kinds of toe pick jumps, spins and, as I witnessed the other day, face plants.
When Beaner invited me to join her and her family for ice skating I was flattered. I hadn’t been for years and, being that the last time I broke a bone was on ice, I was looking for redemption.
As Beaner and I carefully entered the rink she almost fell and, without thinking about it, grabbed me for support. “You grab me for support? Bold move,” I replied. Luckily, we both remained vertical. At the same time that she nearly fell, at least four other patrons were in some sort of injury position on the ice. “Ice skating is such a bad idea,” I told Beaner then realized that sounded incredibly unappreciative since she invited me to join her. Thus, I added, “I’m not saying you wanting to go ice skating is bad; I’m just saying it seems like such a dangerous sport.” Right then, another patron hit the rink, face forward, legs flailing.
Fortunately, we were able to enjoy approximately two hours of skating – only interrupted once by the Zamboni – sans incident. Sadly, the same could not be said of other patrons. There was more than one time that we had to skate around a child or adult who had just biffed it. On one occasion, Beaner’s husband stopped quick and spread his legs in an attempt to go both around and over a fallen patron – this resulted in a pulled groin for him and a whole lot of laughs for us.
Had judges been present at our ice capade our score would have been – on an Olympic scale of 0.0 – 6.0 – 0.0. We might not be going home with the gold, but we’re also not going home with sprains, fractures, breaks, tears, head injuries or lacerations. Ice skating, go figure.