If I'd have went on the ice when this thing happened, someone would have speared me or something. It's a great feeling of accomplishment and pride. They had to do it; it was their moment.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
It was sort of good it happened because it broke the ice with everyone.
I'd never gone as a kid to an ice rink. There was always that fear that I'd break my leg and it would affect my career.
To come back on the ice was hard, and at the same time it was kind of a healing process.
So it wasn't actually that bad, it took a couple of weeks to sort of get used to uh, you know, standing around and pretending to have ice shoot out of your hand, but once you got used to that it uh, it was actually not that hard.
A lot of my friends growing up were hunters, but I spent all my time on the ice hurting actual humans playing hockey. I never had the chance to run through the woods and shoot at a moose or deer. I was shooting pucks at goaltender's heads.
The first year I started hockey, I didn't know how to skate, so I got on the ice with all of the hockey players, and we were doing drills where we had to go backwards in figure eights. And I could not skate, and I just kept falling on my butt, and it was very embarrassing.
I have a pathological terror of falling through ice. I nearly drowned once. I fell off a boat and got a cramp, and was rescued by an oil-rig diver, a great bear of a man who simply leant into the water and scooped me out with one finger.
I played ice hockey obsessively for 14 years of my life.
But I never really thought that I would be extraordinarily successful at skating, it's just something that happened, you know.
My boyfriend's idea of a lesson was to take me on a black diamond run in the middle of a hail storm and say, 'Go!' Ski patrol had to escort me to another lift to get me down the mountain. No, that wasn't humiliating, not at all.