Friday Curling Action

Last Friday, I joined my team from work to an afternoon of beer, snacks, and curling. "Curling?" you say? No, not a workout. The sport!

In a nutshell, curling is a team game that's all about sliding granite stones across a sheet of ice in an attempt to get the most stones in a certain area. To help matters, teammates use brushes to sweep the ice in front of the stones in an effort to make the stones go farther. Sounds bizarre, but it's quite fun.

After a morning of work, we trekked over to the Granite Curling Club. There, we proceeded to have some food and drink, learned how to curl, and played a few games for the remainder of the day.

What I learned:
- Curling's harder than you think, technique-wise. It takes quite a bit of accuracy to get the stone going with the right amount of force & rotation to land roughly in the right spot 120 feet away.
- Sweeping is harder than you think, physically. Rubbing ice with a broom while you walk briskly, making sure you don't fall, and listening to directions from your teammates, is not trivial.
- In curling, everything has a name. And I do mean everything.

An action shot, courtesy of a co-worker of mine.