It’s ironic that I blogged about not blogging about work, because I have a slew of posts this week related to work. Today’s work blog is about curling. Random people from work booked a sheet of ice at the Richmond Hill Curling Club and we went up to try our hand at curling. It was a bit weird because it wasn’t a work-sponsored morale event, we just left in the middle of the day to curl for two hours, then came back to work.

I had never curled before, but from what I heard it was not too bad. It seems like a laid back sport, not something you would do for exercise, but maybe to kill some time — like bowling. We had two people who had experience curling, so they taught us the ropes. I had a bit of difficulty navigating on the ice at first, which I blame on not having gone skating in awhile, but I got a lot better at it once I relearned my skating muscles. We also taped the bottom of our shoes so that we could slide around, so fun! We then spent some time throwing the rocks. This was tough. At first we just practiced sliding off, which took a bit of practice because it was hard to maintain balance. It was actually easier with a rock because you can put weight on it to stabilize yourself, although it’s not something that you should be doing. Eventually I realized that I could either not lose my balance, or aim where I wanted the rock to go.

For the remaining time, we played 3.5 rounds. Our team, even though 75% of us were noobs, beat the other team that had slightly more experience than us by a score of 4-1. Yay for beginner’s luck. It was fun, although I found the game to be a bit slow as there’s a lot of sliding up and down the ice to talk strategy. It is a bit of a workout (although I stress “bit”) too. At times, I had to work hard to keep ahead of the thrown rock, and you can do some crazy sweeping as well. I think the game would be more fun if it was given a Virtua Tennis arcade style treatment though. Just think about your strategy and throw the rocks, hitting your plan 90% of the time.

P.S. I brought my camera, but left it in the lounge area. Too bad we didn’t have subs so I could grab it and take some action shots. Oh well.

Posted by Kevin in Blogs Tags: sports, winter, working