At 6:57 A.M., 64-year-old ice rink owner Ed Schroeder seems almost impossibly awake.
His family business, Rocket Ice in Bolingbrook, Illinois, is still mostly empty, but he greets each staff member and the first sleepy-eyed skaters with a booming voice that fills the space. “SKATE HARD!” he tells a long-haired kid dragging a hockey duffel the size of a body bag. “YOU’RE DOING GREAT!” After they pass, Ed lowers his voice and grabs my arm, guiding me toward a crackling fireplace in the lobby. “That’s what’s missing at most rinks,” he tells me. “Warmth. It’s all too darn cold.”
Ed’s a warm guy. Warm and active. He loves pheasant hunting, dancing all night at weddings, and riding horses with his wife, Sue. “In my prayers,” he says, “I hear God saying, ‘Ed, you need to be physically fit so you can be a good role model. Your grandkids,’”—he has six—“’need to see you water-ski.’”
Family, fitness, and fun are the goals of Rocket Ice, but they’re also, Ed tells me, his code words for God’s love. He points through glass, wiggling his finger, toward a hockey coach snapping a puck to the long-haired kid. “You see that?” he tells me. “That’s God.”
That’s also Doug Bosse, dad of three, who’s been teaching hockey lessons here for five years. He’s not a morning guy, but if a kid wants to get up at 6 A.M., who is he to object? He knows what it’s like to love the game.
Skate hard enough, for just a while, and your trouble almost goes away.
Myself, I’m at the rink today, at the crack of dawn, with a mission: to stay here open to close, learning people’s stories. I’ll interview as many rink rats as I can, asking why they skate. Their answers will run the gamut.
To be free, I’ll hear again and again.
To feel close to his dad, who died.
To become a person I like.
To forget what he’s done, or what’s been done to him—or maybe they’re the same thing, which is the kind of question that keeps you up. Another night staring at the dark. But skate hard enough, for just a while, and your trouble almost goes away.
One of the day’s first skaters is Constantine, a prodigious, floppy-haired 11-year-old who’s working on his triple salchow. He’s accompanied by his mom, Anna, who speaks to him in Russian, watching as he laces his skates. (Generally, kid skaters seem more awake than their parents in the morning. “Whose idea was it to come here?” I ask another mom. She rubs her eyes: “Certainly not mine.”)
Constantine will skate twice today: once before school, and once after, and if he gets some time in between, he’ll go fishing at the lake by his house. Fishing gives the day some balance; unlike skating, it’s out of his control. Constantine enjoys each catch, he tells me, sitting straight up with his hands in his lap, because he never knows: “It could always be my last fish.”
That seems a preternaturally mature sentiment for an 11-year-old, but Constantine is generally preternatural: skating is his purpose, he says, and he likes having a job. He’s been a national champion twice, at the pre-juvenile and juvenile levels, and his goal this year is to make the national development team, which would mean attending a special camp with Team USA. Does he have a skating hero? Negative. But, he allows, he admires two-time Olympic gold medalist Yuzuru Hanyu’s work, particularly Hanyu’s jumps and his ability to recover after he falls. “It’s really beautiful skating to watch.” The better you get at skating, Constantine tells me, the more it feels like you can fly.
Across the lobby, a young woman paces in. Twenty-one-year-old Jayna Holman is a full-time competitive skater, and along with Constantine—the two of them grace posters throughout the lobby—she’s Rocket Ice’s crown jewel. She has impeccable posture, clean-girl slicked hair, perfect makeup, and such a sweet, open smile that I want to give her a hug.
Jayne sticks to the same routine each day: she gets up at 5:30 A.M., drinks hot lemon water, does her hair, picks her skating outfit (today: brown turtleneck, black leggings, gold necklace, and small gold hoops), drives an hour to the rink, trains, cooks, journals, takes a bath, and gets back to bed by nine. I ask, what would surprise people about her? “I’m a perfectionist,” she says, which would surprise nobody, but she shares it like a confession.
Jayna remembers when she realized she was special, after a Christmas show one year as a kid. She stepped off the ice and “so many people came up to me, congratulating me. They had to see something, right?” Then, when she was nine, she had an undefeated season, and she understood that skating’s what she’s meant to do. When Jayna walks through the rink doors, she feels fulfilled. “When I’m in here, I can be a person I’m proud of.”
How does it feel to know that every other skater looks up to her? I ask. Is she kind of a unicorn? Jayna nods. “This sport can be very lonely,” she tells me, but solo doesn’t mean alone. Like Ed, she feels God on the ice. She prays in her head while she’s training, and in competitions, too, calming her thoughts before each jump. “Each element I do is part of God’s plan for me,” she says. “I rely on the fact that I’m never alone.”
Once she’s skating, Jayna’s face hardens, a steely concentration that seems to fall over her the instant she steps on the ice. She accelerates hard with one hand on her hip, then lifts into a floaty double lutz that she seems to execute without noticing, as if brushing hair from her face. A minute later, she lands a double axel with one arm swinging up, a split-second’s waver before steadying out. She’s added to her outfit: she wears baby-pink gloves. The other skaters watch her while they rest.
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