Action resumes

There’s a saying in hockey: the fastest player on the ice is the one who’s just given the puck away. It’s true. I know this because I’ve just proven it ... and I couldn’t be more thrilled!

OK, I guess I’m not thrilled that I gave the puck away, and that it was to one of the other team’s faster forwards, and that he’s now bearing down on our goalie thanks to a 150-foot breakaway that I gift wrapped for him.

But, on the plus side, after putting my head down and skating my hardest, I’ve erased his 15-foot headstart and am now hot on his heels. I’m glowing with warm satisfaction. Hockey season has begun ... and I’m fast again!

*        *        *

When I got word in early September that our first game was scheduled for Sept. 15 my immediate thought was, “I can’t play hockey, it will get in the way of my training!”

After I got my head around the reality that my hockey training was in fact going to give way to actual hockey playing, I had to adjust my plan for the last chunk of the off-season, as this start date was a week earlier than I’d anticipated. One of my intentions during this last stretch was to attend at least two sessions of pickup shinny, but my suddenly compressed schedule allowed for only one such outing.

My goal for this particular ice session, besides the usual objectives of getting used to skates again and shaking off some rust, was to try to do more than I usually do, such as hold onto the puck more and try to beat opponents one-on-one, with speed, stickhandling or a combination of both. I wanted to try moves, even when I knew I shouldn’t, to really test what I can and can’t do, and ideally, expand my comfort zone a bit.

It was with great anticipation that I stepped onto the ice. Not only was I in the best shape of my life but my fit body had been specifically trained for the very activity in which I was about to engage. I wondered what it would feel like.

As I skated around, I noticed with satisfaction that my legs felt strong and energetic. I was moving significantly faster than I had in a few years and this effort wasn’t sapping my legs of their strength. On the other hand, the puck felt awkward on my stick and my shot felt like it hadn’t improved at all.

After we divided into sides and dropped the puck, I found I had more jump than I’d had in years. I was keeping up with the brisk pace without much trouble. However, I soon found that my stamina wasn’t great. My legs, while feeling strong initially, filled with a slight ache, a faint form of the burn you feel when you exert your muscles to their maximum. Moving around the rink became a bit more of a struggle and I had to fight to avoid slipping into my old pattern of doing as little as possible on the ice.

A few times I did force myself to hang onto the puck longer than usual and attempt to stickhandle past defenders or outskate them. Sometimes defenders easily swatted the puck away from me, but my speed bursts did earn me a few unfettered forays at the net. Of course, this was pickup hockey, where the effort devoted to defending tends to be lacklustre, so the extent of my improvement was hard to gauge.

*        *        *

As the season began and progressed through its first few games, the issue with leg fatigue persisted. I was puzzled. I’d spent months honing these aged appendages into densely muscled pistons of hockey propulsion — why were they getting tired after a few minutes of exertion? 

I had an inkling that it may have to do with post-workout recovery time. I turned to the Internet, which told me that it can take anywhere from two to four days for muscles to recover after heavy exercise. I’d generally been performing leg-centric strength and power training about every second day. When I had a hockey game scheduled, I would take a break from such endeavours for 48 hours prior to the game. I thought this was allowing my muscles enough recovery time, but maybe I was wrong.

I started giving the old drumsticks an extra day off between workouts and before games. In fairly short order the burning stopped. I adjusted my workout schedule accordingly.

All catched up

So anyway, getting back to that guy on the breakaway, which was caused, incidentally, by wretched ice conditions and not a miscue on my part ... honest. As it turned out, the ice also contributed significantly to the resolution of the situation.

As the guy advanced into the deep slot, I was about a stick length away, not quite close enough to disrupt his attack but poised to take advantage of any miscue. He made a fake or two before getting the puck to his forehand for what was to be the fatal shot. Just then the puck skipped on the sandpapery ice, causing him to shoot only air. Before he could do anything more I swiped the bouncing puck into the corner and out of danger. Opportunity denied.

That play was a snapshot moment, one of several from my first few games, that illustrated where I’m at in my development as a late-blooming beer leaguer. In my next blog post, I will share a few more of these moments. Stay tuned.

Stickin’ with it

I’ve never been compared to Pavel Datsyuk, the Russian hockey star whose puckhandling wizardry has been in heavy rotation in NHL highlight packages since he became a regular with the Detroit Red Wings in 2001. But at one time I was skilled enough that, when I had a puck on my stick, I felt I was in complete possession of it and could control what happened next.

That feeling has been relegated to the archives of my memory for years now, replaced by the knowledge that I would be soundly trounced if I was ever in a stickhandling contest against a cow equipped with a snow shovel.

In an effort to improve the sorry state of this fundamental hockey skill, I started stickhandling a plastic orange hockey ball in my garage for about 10 minutes every day starting back in early June. The ball felt completely foreign on my stick at first but gradually began to feel more at home.

In August when I finally acquired my shooting pads, I commandeered the larger one for stickhanding practice and experimented with various practice pucks and balls that I’d also acquired. I consulted YouTube for stickhandling drills and adopted a fairly regimented approach to the whole endeavour.

The puck I prefer is a vulcanized rubber one that’s the same size and shape as an official puck except it’s two ounces lighter and it’s blue. On the shooting pad it feels similar to a regular puck on ice although it does jump up on edge a fair bit. Another one I like is a very light floor hockey puck I bought for $2. I like to use this one either on the pad or on the bare concrete floor. It flips around quite a bit as well but otherwise feels similar to a puck on ice.

Various stickhandling objects are available. The Dryland
Puck (bottom left) costs $12 and is purported to be viable
on a sliding surface or floor. In my opinion, it performs
poorly in both settings. The Green Biscuit, which sells for
about $13, slides okay on a slippery surface but feels heavier
and clunkier than a puck on ice. The blue puck ($2) is like a
regular puck except it's two ounces lighter. It works fairly
well on a shooting pad. The Swedish Ball ($4, second row, left)
is a very lightweight wooden ball that really flies around a
shooting pad. It's good for working on quick hands. The
Extreme Stickhandling Ball ($9, second row, right) is heavy
and hard. Surprisingly, on a shooting pad it has a feel similar 
to a puck on ice. The basic orange floor hockey puck ($2), 
slides nicely on a floor or shooting pad.

I also have two balls that I like. Let me rephrase that: I also have a couple of balls that are fun to stickhandle. OK, what I mean is: I’ve got two little balls that are specifically made for hockey stickhandling practice and I like each of them for the specific properties they possess. One of these is somewhat heavy and made of rubber; the other one is light and made of wood. The rubber one, called the Extreme Stickhandling Ball, feels similar to a puck when handled on a slippery shooting pad. The wooden one is called the Swedish Ball and is billed as the speed bag of stickhandling because it moves very quickly, which is good for developing quick hands.

 With my stickhandling, my main objective has been to solidify the basics like moving the puck from side to side and front to back, nothing too fancy, just some fundamental skills that will allow me to skate with the puck without feeling like it’s a grenade with the pin pulled.

Despite my committment to keeping it simple, curiosity got the better of me one day and I found myself on YouTube studying a step-by-step breakdown of the toe drag, a high-level hockey maneouvre that involves pulling the puck toward you with the toe of the stick then quickly dragging it sideways past your own feet as you burst past a helpless defender. When executed well, this maneouvre seems to defy the laws of physics, leaving defenders swiping at air as the puck teleports from one side of them to the other and the puck carrier swoops past to mount an assault on their goalie. As a defender, I’ve been victimized by this move more times than I’d care to relate.

Even though I’m technically incapable of performing this trick, I’ve sometimes succumbed to temptation and attempted it anyway, always with the same result: the defender easily divesting me of the puck along with fragments of my dignity.

Actually, once and only once I did successfully employ the stunt, but I was so surprised to arrive on the other side of the defender with the puck that I lurched into a speed wobble that grew wilder as I careened  toward the goal. In the end, the puck and a glorious scoring chance simply slipped away like an eel.

At any rate, I’ve been working on this toe drag thing within the controlled conditions within my garage, having concluded that, if having some basic skills is good, having some more advanced skills is better. I’m not convinced I’ll ever master this move or be a player described as having “good hands,” but if I spot a cow carrying a snow shovel I’ll gladly throw down a puck and take her on.

A rootin’ shootin’ good time

There’s a certain satisfaction that comes from nailing a target consistently when firing shots out of your garage late at night.

I know this first hand because every night for the past two weeks I’ve been setting up for some good old, down home shootin’ practice, firing with determination and glee at a target set up in my driveway.

Now before you imagine some sort of hillbilly scene featuring spent shotgun shells scattered about or Winchester hollow points whistling through the night, let me remind you that this here is a hockey blog. Ergo, I’m talking about shooting hockey pucks here, plain old six-ounce hunks of vulcanized rubber ... 200 of ‘em.

I’d meant to start practicing my shooting much earlier in the off-season but it took me a while to assemble the equipment I needed to create a workable setup.

The main puzzle piece was some sort of slippery surface from which to shoot my pucks since I knew from experience that shooting off a surface like a concrete floor or a piece of plywood wouldn’t translate well to on-ice performance. I did considerable research into the available options and, after much deliberation, placed an online order for two shooting pads: a four-foot by 10-foot rollup pad valued at $160 and a thicker 30-inch by 60-inch pad priced at $100 (plus $50 to ship both items from Ontario).

The order arrived on Aug. 19, only about a month before I expected the season to start. I quickly set up my shooting gallery according to a plan I’d refined in my mind after weeks of scheming.

I knew from experience that dryland shooting while wearing shoes also doesn’t translate well to the ice so one of my priorities was to devise a system that would enable me to wear skates while shooting. I also wanted a system that was quick and easy to set up and take down, since I don’t have a spot where I can leave it assembled on an ongoing basis.

The system I devised involves a couple of old blankets draped over a piece of wood suspended across two metal poles (racks used to hold up barbells for squats, etc.) I used heavy duty clamps bought at a hardware store to hold the blankets in place.

I set up this rig on my driveway about 10 or 15 feet outside my garage door then set up both shooting pads side by side on the floor inside the garage. The idea was to shoot from inside the garage (where there’s a solid, level floor), through the open bay door into the draped blankets. The larger shooting pad was to be the shooting surface and the smaller, thicker one was for me to stand on (in skates, even though the pad isn’t made to withstand this kind of abuse).

My first full shooting session was on Aug. 27. It took me about 17 minutes to shoot my 200 pucks. I was surprised to find that this seemingly inert exercise caused me to run out of breath — I had to rest numerous times. The repeated torque of the shooting action was also murder on the hand that holds the top of my stick. By the time I was half done my pile of pucks, I had a hole in the skin in the middle of my palm and another at the base of my pointing finger, revealing the tender, reddish sublayers.

By the time I was down to 60 pucks remaining, I had two bloody spots in the palms of my gloves and I was in serious pain. But I foolishly persevered, determined to finish my 200-puck quota.

After that, I took four days off from shooting, to give my hand a chance to heal a bit, then I got back at it. My hand was still quite sore but I relaxed my grip and spared it from further damage. This time it took me 13 minutes to shoot all the pucks.

Blankets are effective at funneling pucks into a cohesive pile for easy retrieval.

Since that day I’ve shot my 200 pucks every day, racking up 1,400 shots so far. I’m concentrating on the classic wrist shot because the league I play in doesn’t allow slap shots. I’m still trying to nail down the perfect technique as there are many subtle mechanical adjustments one can make and it’s hard to discern what effect each little change is having on the shot speed.

This is where a radar gun would come in handy. There are outlets that sell them for sports like hockey and baseball but that’s $100 I refuse to spend. For now at least I must be content to judge by feel and by sight.

The blankets work really well. Not only are they quick and easy to set up but they are also virtually silent. It’s usually about 11 p.m. when I’m doing my shots and the only sound is a faint thwack when each puck hits the blanket followed by a light clanging as the wooden pole rattles around in the metal rack.

The blankets are also very effective at directing pucks into a cohesive pile. In fact, my blankets are long enough to lie on the ground, so most of the pucks fall on top of them, and most of the pucks can be retrieved at once by gathering up the bottom of the blankets and dumping the pucks into their storage container. Pickup is done in about three minutes.

I feel that I’ve improved quite a bit within the first two weeks of practice. I’m getting my shots away quickly and it looks like they have a fair amount of zip on them. But I suspect if I measured the actual speed it would be rather unimpressive and if you pitted me against a good shooter, I would look very wimpy in comparison.

In hockey, really hard shooters are said to have a howitzer. Throughout my hockey career, I’ve been in possession of nothing more powerful than a homemade slingshot, but the progress I’ve made over the last couple weeks gives me a glimmer of hope that, maybe someday, I’ll be the proud owner of a genuine shootin’ iron of some calibre ... a dream come true for any self respecting hillbilly, I reckon.

Wheeling and dealing – Part 2

This off-season I’ve been pulled simultaneously in two opposite directions: the relentless desire to buy stuff to help my training and the relentless reality of limited finances.

These two elements battled mightily about two months ago when I found myself dying to buy a semi-fancy digital watch that could time intervals.

For those who are unaware, interval training involves alternating between exertion and rest for specified amounts of time in order to achieve specific physical outcomes. Interval workouts have been an integral part of my program since I started training about a year ago. One of my regular modules calls for a work-to-rest ratio of 10 seconds to 50 seconds. Another one is 30 seconds of givin’ ‘er followed by two minutes of rest. And my personal favourite is the good old scheme of two minutes on, two minutes off.

Up until recently I didn’t have a device that could manage these times for me, so I just counted in my head as I was doing my moves, not really knowing how close I was coming to the actual times. For example, I’d be grinding out a wind sprint, practically dying, while counting in my head, “20 Mississippi, 21 Mississippi ... come on 30 Mississippi!”

The system was quaint in its imperfection when I was first easing into this training thing, but as I’ve become more serious, I’ve felt a desire for accuracy.

In the spring I succumbed to temptation and conducted some online research into watches. I quickly discovered the Timex Sleek 150 and ascertained that it was the best watch for me because it allows the user to program three different interval schemes. I spent more time than I care to admit gazing at pictures of this prized timepiece.

The watch was out of reach due to the $125 price. Granted, this isn’t that much money in the grand scheme of things. Like, if I’d been facing some needed repair to my car or teeth, I could have come up with that much and more, but given that my hockey training is really a self-indulgent hobby that benefits no one else in my family, I couldn’t justify the expense.

Desire

But I must admit that I do sometimes become obsessed with objects of desire, and that’s what this watch became. Even though I told myself unequivocally that I couldn’t have it, I couldn’t get it out of my mind. One day I even ventured into a specialty running store to leer at the watch in person.

It took me mere seconds to spot it in its glass case, looking even more stunning than in the online pictures. How I longed to strap on that sleek little number and finger its buttons until a lap split, even if it was just a fleeting, one-time thing. 

But I wouldn’t allow myself to indulge this fantasy. The display case remained unopened, the watch untouched, staring at me with snooty disdain as its $125 price tag dangled with a forced casualness that was as infuriating as it was alluring.

Days and weeks passed. I accepted that the watch would never be mine but couldn’t shake the desire to possess it. Then one day I couldn’t resist popping into my local sporting goods emporium to see if that store also carried the watch in question. It did. And the watch was on clearance for $60, less than half the regular price!

My reaction was instant. I shielded the display case with my arms and body while summoning a clerk with violent movements of my head and eyebrows.

The rest is a blur. There was a key, then a box, then a credit card, followed by a sense of elation as I drifted to my car.

Good timing

I’ve been using the watch for several weeks now and it’s been one of those rare obsession purchases that has lived up to expectations. Truly, the watch has improved my life, and yes, I love it. There, I said it — I love my watch!

I’ve got three different interval workouts programmed into it and use them all regularly. It’s nice not to have to program it each time I do a different workout. And the watch counts the number of reps as I perform each interval sequence so I don’t have to keep track of those in my head.

But the best feature is simply that I no longer have to count Mississippis in my head. Instead, I can concentrate on doing my moves and maintaining them as my leg muscles melt, until that magical moment arrives when I’m saved by that most musical of sounds: “Beepity-beepity-BEEP!”

My old John Deere

I’m not a fan of country music but there’s a bit of country music lore that’s loosely relevant to my recent training exploits.

Legendary country singer George Jones was known as an enthusiastic consumer of “adult beverages.” In fact, he was such an incorrigible booze hound that his wife once hid the keys to all his vehicles so he couldn’t drive to a liquor store or bar. But wily old Jonesy still made his escape after noticing a key dangling from the ignition of his old John Deere riding mower. This incident and more subsequent ones became well known in country music circles and were further immortalized in Vince Gill’s 1993 song One More Last Chance, which featured the line, “but she forgot about my old John Deere.”

How this relates to me is that I think I may have bested old Jonesy when it comes to unconventional usage of a John Deere riding mower.

You see, by about the midway point of this off-season I got my leg strength up to the point that I could start pursuing serious speed work. This is an endeavour that hockey players and other athletes typically pursue through the pushing or pulling of heavy objects, which develops the legs for explosive bursts of going real fast. An example of such training can be seen in this video, which shows NHLer Martin St. Louis engaging in a mind-blowing display of sled hauling (pertinent bit starts at :40 of the video).

As a lowly beer leaguer, I don’t have access to the types of resistance mechanisms that the pros use, so I’ve had to improvise.

Earlier this off-season I experimented with sprinting up the grassy hill that lies next to our house. The scheme didn’t take root because the uneven terrain was face-plantingly treacherous after dark, which is when I usually do my training.

A couple of times (during daylight hours) I loaded one or both of my kids into a wagon and pushed it as fast as I could up our sloped driveway, with the oldest kid (age 7) in charge of steering the wagon. This method didn’t take off either, as the gravel driveway provided rather poor traction and was therefore unsuitable for fast starts. Also, once the kids realized that I wasn’t really doing the exercise for their enjoyment, they stopped agreeing to participate.

Another time I loaded a wheelbarrow with bags of dirt and sprinted it up our driveway a few times. Again, traction was a serious drawback to the scheme.

As all these trials and errors were taking place, I often eyed the old John Deere SX-95 riding mower that was sitting innocently in front of our garage. I knew the thing was heavy and difficult to push because I’d experienced these facts many times in the course of mowing our wild environs. So one night I decided to accomplish my speed work by pushing the mower up our driveway.

It was a decent system. I’d push the mower up the slope for about 10 seconds then let it roll back down into position for the next rep. But again the one problem was traction on the gravel driveway. Still, I felt that the mower was the right tool; I just needed to match it with the right location.

I knew that solid traction and a relatively level surface were available on the paved road of our subdivision, but even I wasn’t willing to endure the humiliation that would occur when a neighbour came driving along as I was pushing the mower down the road after dark. Such a meeting would be inevitable and would most certainly yield a healthy dose of slackjawed gawking and possibly even force me into offering some sort of explanation. What could I possibly say?

“Hey neighbour! What’s that? Oh, just taking old JD here out for a spot of exercise! Tootle-loo!”

I don’t think so.

Fashion risk

That left our front lawn as the only remaining option. It has the benefit of being quite flat and it’s also sheltered from the view of passersby. I knew there would be a traction issue here too as the grass is always damp and slick during my workout times. The best solution would have been some form of cleated shoes like those used for soccer, football or baseball, but I don’t have any of those and I’m too cheap to buy some just for one exercise.

So once again I made do with what I have. I set off wearing the most aggressively treaded footwear I own – a pair of green rubber oilfield boots that are still caked with bitumen stains collected on drilling rigs throughout Western Canada more than a decade ago. Imagine that look with cutoff shorts and pasty poultry legs – now that’s a three-alarm fashion faux pas! But like I’ve said many times, hockey training ain’t no fashion show.

Anyway, back and forth I went, grunting the 400-pound mower in a bouncing, clattering trajectory across our front lawn, which proved to be much rougher than it appears.

But the scheme worked. By holding onto the steering wheel and pushing the mower backwards, I was able to keep it on course while providing my legs with a burningly productive workout.

So, just like Vince Gill’s song of more than 20 years ago, my ode to the old John Deere has proven to be a hit and has achieved regular rotation ... in my workout schedule that is.

Digging deeper

Hockey season starts in about a month and as far as I can tell I’m on track to be in peak form when the puck drops. This is despite an inauspicious start to my off-season training.

In the early going I struggled to address the strength and cardio components laid out in my guide book while also providing my muscles with sufficient recovery time.

One thing that was tripping me up, I eventually realized, was that I was misreading my body’s signals. What I interpreted as muscle fatigue caused by the workouts I was doing actually turned out to be plain old weakness in my leg muscles. As a consequence, I wound up resting my legs, thinking they needed time to recover, when I should have been working them more regularly to make them stronger.

A more thorough reading of my book supplemented by some Internet research and some simple trial and error helped me to sort through my confusion and I put together a solid plan for the summer.

This plan involved dividing the off-season into three segments. The first segment focused on building my basic cardio capacity through regular runs and Xbox boxing sessions, with a secondary focus on building leg strength and beginning to develop the anaerobic energy systems in the legs, which is accomplished through timed sprints.

The second segment dialed down the frequency of cardio workouts and increased the frequency of anaerobic workouts. The third segment, which I’m just beginning, will continue to build strength and power in the legs, as well as overall cardio capacity, but will concentrate almost exclusively on hockey-related movements to achieve these goals, so the results translate as much as possible to the hockey rink.

Key change

A key adjustment I made this off-season was changing how I’ve performed my 30-second anaerobic intervals, which are a critical element in priming the leg muscles for the dynamic demands of hockey. Last year I approached this element by sprinting in a straight line but I’ve since realized that this type of movement has little relevance to hockey so I switched to doing hockey-related movements like lateral footwork, crossovers, leaps and pivots.

These exercises really make the leg muscles burn, which signalled to me that I needed to focus on them, since they mimic what my legs must endure during a hockey game. By doing these exercises regularly at a high intensity, I’ve been able to gradually increase the interval work time to 45 seconds and decrease the rest time from two minutes to 1:10. By the time the off-season is over, my aim is to have the work time up to a full minute followed by a minute of rest. This will closely approximate the shift-rest cycle I typically experience during a beer-league hockey game.

Need for speed

A key component of the latter half of my off-season has been a concentrated effort on exercises designed to boost my skating speed. This is achieved by making the legs stronger through squats of increasingly heavy weight, lateral leaps and sprinting against some form of resistance.

My book says that before undertaking serious speed training, a player should be able to perform several repetitions of deep squats of his own body weight. I started the off-season squatting 140 pounds, which is 10 pounds less than my body weight. I gradually worked up to 150 pounds and within a couple sessions was able to comfortably perform three sets of 10 squats.

This was my cue to start undertaking serious speed training, which I’ve been doing for the past month or so. This speed work is key, as speed used to be my hallmark as a player and its departure is what I’ve missed the most as I’ve aged.

I’m not sure how much of my lost speed I can recover, but I hope to be fast enough to keep up with the fast, young guys who populate our league. I’m emboldened by the fact that, when I was in my late 20s, I played regularly with some older guys and the fastest guy on the ice was this 44-year-old guy who was about my size.

The reason that this guy – let’s call him Brian – was able to be so fast at his age was that he took care of his body. I think of him often when I’m out training and visualizing what I hope to achieve this upcoming season. As a formerly fast player who’s now trapped inside a 44-year-old body, my dream is to be able to step on the gas and have my body respond.

Wheeling and dealing – Part 1

As I mentioned in my previous blog post, I’ve realized that I require additional equipment if I’m to take my training to the next level. One of the items I placed on my must-acquire list was a whole whack of pucks for shooting practice.

Like any schmoe who plays hockey, I had some pucks kicking around the house, like 10 or so, but I knew this paltry number wouldn’t do if I was going to work seriously at improving my shot. I needed to take a significant number of shots every day but also wanted to minimize the amount of time spent retrieving pucks. The solution, I figured, was to have enough pucks that I could shoot the entire batch once, then retrieve them afterward and be ready for the next day.

The number I settled on was 200. This may seem crazy, but it isn’t.

I estimate that a hockey player, while practicing his shooting in much the same way as a golfer practices at a driving range, can fire a puck every two to four seconds. So working through 200 pucks would take anywhere from 400 to 800 seconds (seven to 14 minutes) – a manageable amount of time to spend every day. Plus, I think 200 pucks would be manageable space-wise and lead to improvement if shot every day.

So I set about finding 200 pucks. About the cheapest place around to buy pucks in my part of the world is Canadian Tire, a department store. It sells brand new pucks for 98 cents each – not a bad price but much too high when you’re looking at buying 200 of them. (I wasn’t prepared to spend $200 on this acquisition).

Turning to the Internet, I learned that 50 cents a puck is about the best price you can get. On Kijiji I found a guy in my area offering 200 pucks for $100 – right in my wheelhouse. We agreed on the price via email and I awaited a response about a meeting time and place. Meanwhile, I got a text response from another seller I’d contacted. It was a fellow acting as an agent for his eight-year-old kid, who collects pucks around outdoor rinks each spring. I told him I’d already settled on a deal.

Then seller No. 1 emailed back with meeting instructions.

“I usually meet my buyers in the Co-op parking lot. Look for a black Honda,” he told me.

Whoa. This guy regularly makes deals in parking lots? And he drives a black Honda?

I realized that I was about to do business with a deadly Asian triad that specializes in stolen hockey gear!

I could see exactly how it would play out. We’d be conducting our business and would start up an innocent discussion about a random beer-league topic – the relative merits of dumping and chasing, perhaps. But he’d be pro and I’d be con, and with the suddenness of a Kansas tornado, our disagreement would turn violent. In the end, the evening news would relate how my lifeless body was found stuffed in a Co-op shopping cart with a wad of hockey tape jammed in my mouth and a jagged chunk of composite stick protruding from my neck.

I texted the kid’s dad and asked if he’d sell 200 pucks for $85. The kid went for it so I gingerly backed out of the deal with the triad guy.

So I’m happy to report that I now have 200 pucks in my garage. I haven’t shot any of them yet because I need some more stuff to complete my shooting gallery, which is in the works.

For those of you who are curious, 200 pucks weigh in at about 70 pounds and nearly fill a large plastic storage container, displacing about 1.6 cubic feet, or 45.3 litres, of volume.