Bonus Ice

I was feeling bummed out about three days off the ice (horrors!) so I spent a bit of time doing what I could.

1. I made soakers for my blades by following these instructions from Ice Mom. They were so easy, and now I don't have to worry about my blades getting damaged by the other things in my bag, and vice-versa. Thanks Ice Mom!
   
2. Scoured the web for more ice time. I found early morning ice with the club in the next town over, but the bus doesn't start running early enough to get me there :O Also found early ice at another rink but just wasn't jazzed about the logistics of how I was going to make it to this rink, then to work, then to yoga class, not to mention being out of the house for 16 hours (I draw the line at about 13 generally). However I did discover that I can spend almost the entire weekend skating since all the public skates seem to be packed into the weekend, but that is just a bit much for my bad knees and back.

In my search I did stumble across a good session though, an Adult Skate on Thursday nights at a rink that is not that far from the gym where I teach aerobics on Thursday night. It even starts just after my class ends, and this week I have the car so there was nothing stopping me from going. I spent all day yesterday and today looking forward to it! The arena is brand new and I had never been to it before, it's quite beautiful. The ice was in good condition and no fog :) The only thing that was lame was that there was a group lesson going on in the far end, so they coned off approximately half of the area from the blue line onward. This was reasonable, but after a while they moved the cones to the blue line, which sort of crunched the rest of us in a bit more. The silly thing was that the lessons weren't really occupying the new space. I saw a couple talking to the ice monitors shortly after the cones were moved, I wonder if they were giving them an earful about it. But the cones stayed at the blue line nonetheless.

I had never been to an adult skate before but it was really cool. No kids darting around, no hordes of teenagers, and not even crowded. If we had had the whole surface it would have been dreamy.

What did I work on? I tried to practice my new skills patterns but there were still too many people in the way and with so much of the ice coned off anyway it was not really worth it. I can practice them tomorrow morning and first thing on Saturday. I spent a lot of time just noodling around with three-turns and mohawks, not really trying to do anything specific. I tried some brackets and loops too. I practiced my stroking and crossovers, and they are sloppy. Too much toe-pushing and toe scratching, yuck. I did power pulls (i.e. one-foot slaloms) and they are also sloppy so I practiced them for longer than I expected that I would.

I did a lot of spinning. Scratch, proto-layback (aka, attitude?) sit, back scratch, back sit, and even a bit of camel. I am tacking a back sit onto most of my forward spins just for the extra practice. One thing I realized after thinking about recently is that on my camel entrance I tend to step out too far. This puts my centre of mass behind my skating foot, which spells disaster because I can never get it back over my skating foot, especially once I get into the camel position, forget it. This time I tried to get my weight over my skate from the very beginning and it seemed to help. Now I don't fall out of the camel that often, it is just slow. Whee! Slow camel is better than always-falling-over camel. My backspins still suck. 'Nuff said. My forward sit-spin and upright spin still travel and I can feel that I don't have my weight over my skate. I'll need to get my coach to help me fix that.

I experimented with a bit of opposite-direction spinning just for fun. It feels so wrong. But it would be cool to have just one clockwise spin in my repertoire, you don't see skaters that can spin both ways every day.

Oh, my double-agency is out of the bag - one of my hockey team girls was there tonight! She seemed surprised to learn that I also figure skate! I am curious if the team will razz me about it a bit, heh. Hockey players tend to notice the artistic, dance-type features of skating more than they notice the hard falls, strength and control that it takes to excel at it. Not that I am actually doing any of those things :S