Curling Review

Curling: potentially the second greatest sport ever (behind baseball). John, Robert and I did the curling thing on Friday. The result? A couple hours of heaven followed by a day of tight hamstrings. The evening started out with a short video on the history, rules, and scoring of curling. Since we had all watched the Olympic curling religiously, this was mostly old news for us. After applying a giant strip of tape to the bottom of our left shoes, we made our way to the ice, grabbing our brooms on the way. The instructors were kind enough to remind us that we should step onto the ice with our gripping foot and not the sliding foot. Despite the reminder, a few people in the class almost went down. The first thing to address was the throwing motion. We lined up along the boards on one knee with the brooms laid on the ice in front of us. We then pushed off the wall to learn the curling throw form. After a couple tries, we replaced the broom with a rock in each hand and again pushed ourselves off the wall. Again, after a couple tries, we moved on to the next activity. The next step was using the actual curling blocks (called hacks) instead of the boards. The first attempt at this was using a rock in the shooting hand and a "training wheel" of sorts (basically a plastic handle to lean on). After one attempt with the training wheel, we replaced it with the broom and we were curling.

After a few trial runs, they let us start throwing rocks the length of the sheet. All three of us left the first toss short. In fact, we didn't even make it to the hog line, which is the line that you must pass in order to leave the rock in play (either as a score or as a block). Of course, our second throws all went straight through the house as we all managed to over correct our weak first throws! After that, we started to put rocks in play with more consistancy. John was the first to place a rock in the house and Robert and I followed with house shots later in the night.

I can't begin to explain how fun it actually was. I would highly recommend the introductory class for anyone who is looking to fill a couple hours for one night. It was $20 and completely worth getting a glimpse into a completely new sports experience. We had so much fun, we are looking into joining a league. The problem is the expense of the league. The league costs $225 per person (with 4 people on a team) for a 10 week season. That is the nature of ice time in Colorado. Expensive. However, we are going to look for a sponsor to pick up half of the registration fees and team shirts. That might make it more reasonable for all of us. As always, I will keep you posted on the progress of our Olympic curling team!!

After reading Dunham's blog, I, too, realized that I have been blogging for over 2 years now. Time has truly flown by the last couple years and I am glad I have been able to throw some thoughts, observations, etc. down for other people to see. Hopefully you have enjoyed it as much as I have.

To the next post!
Mike