The Angels and Devils Before a World Championship

It’s the time of the year, when your facebook feed starts flooding with pre-worlds activities: Player selections are posted, national crowdfundings are opened, the new team suit designs are being released. Everyone is posting about final training camps and last-chance testing competitions. Because worlds is just around the corner! You feel the butterflies in your stomach — the excitement, the nervousness, the curiosity. What will worlds bring? How will you do? But in between all the butterflies, silent anxiety also creeps in. What if I don’t perform good enough? What if all the training does not lead to the results we expected? What if the entire journey turns out to not be worth it?

Why to Start Weightlifting as a Woman

Okay, let’s start with: Why not to start weightlifting as a woman? Because, in fact, many of us fear that weightlifting will cause us to appear too buff, too bulky, too strong. Not female enough. Not pretty enough. Not sexy enough. If you as a woman express this concern, the common reaction amongst colleagues, coaches, and online sites is this: “Don’t worry. It’s not going to happen. Testosterone levels in female body are usually far too little to allow for large muscles. Rather than looking utterly most muscular, you will look only more defined.” True. But what if the respond was this instead: “Oh cool, your lean and athletic female body will just go along with the new beauty ideal of the 21st century!  You’ll look fabulous and super attractive.” I think this would be the far better answer society could give — apart from eliminating the entire construct of female beauty ideals in general. Strong and lean female bodies should not undergo negative judgment. They should be what we want our daughters to look like.

Fight or Flight: Feelings in Ice

If you are a swimmer, you know those minutes just before you get into the pool: you are standing at the side, starring at the water, contemplating whether to get into the wet and cold, delaying it just another more minute, because you really don’t feel like it. Well. Now. Imagine you are standing in front of an ice pond, it is minus degrees Celsius and you cannot even see the water in-between all those floating ice cubes. You are wearing your swimsuit and you are contemplating to get in.

When Hockey Makes the World Change its Color

It is one day of travelling, two days of training and then plunging into a completely different world, into five days of fierce competition at the European Championship. It is a time in which adrenaline rules your body. A time in which the world seems brighter and the clouds seem darker than usual. Laughter and tears are closer together than ever. You sleep, eat, and breath solely for your team.

I started strength training to get better at hockey. Instead, I got a better life.

I spent years during my childhood and teenage years training in the pool. During undergrad and grad school, I started adding hours and hours of underwater hockey on top. But never in my life had I done any serious strength training. I began when my hockey coach said that we need to train our core if we really want to become elite players. The core would improve our flick, our curl, our kick, pretty much everything. By that time, “core” was still a synonym for “abdominals” for me.

Why Underwater Hockey is More Than a Sport

Underwater Hockey is a sport. Regardless if you’ve heard about it or not, it’s a real sport. But it is also so much more. For me, underwater hockey is a life-style. It becomes an integral part of your personality. It is like a virus, for which there is no immune reaction. If infected, good luck with the rest of your life.

What it means to play a world championship in underwater hockey

“Basically, it is everything from real life, just transformed down into a very small and safe environment.” That’s what my coach said. And yes, basically that’s it. It has ups and downs. When you are up, you enjoy the journey. When you are down, you have to fight to get back up.  And the fight is hard. It is very emotional. Joy and pride about victories. Anger and frustration about losses. Pain and tiredness from your body.