roll models

This year, a group of Auckland women started meeting in a clandestine location each week. By day, they worked full-time and raised families, but by night, they shed that skin and transformed.

Michele Martin, Justine Conroy and Tracy McKay are just three of many women who found an unlikely new sense of freedom, joy and escape simply by strapping on some roller skates.

Now all in their mid-forties, the trio skated as kids in the 80s, distinctly remembering Olivia Newton-John’s “Xanadu” as an anthem of their roller-skating memories. Michele resumed skating a couple of years ago when her teen daughter took an