Whirlwind Weekend

Wow, I had a busy three days!

Friday

Got up early to skate at 7am and skate at the foggy arena with the stalactites. Actually they were not too bad this time, but still not quite ideal. I got to work on my figures again. They are still atrocious. I had these dreams of trying some of the advanced figures involving brackets and loops and such but my basic circle eights have a long way to go before I am ready for that. But I am lucky to have so much ice to myself to practice them! If I spend 15 minutes on them every Friday morning, they make be back to some kind of testable condition by the end of the season (not that you can test them anymore).

After my figures I spent some time warming up and going through some skills. My coach worked on some jumps with me, we have finally moved on to salchow and toe loop jumps. I was swinging my free leg wildly in my salchow, which my coach is trying to fix. Apparently it should stay close as it comes around and cross in front before bending both knees and driving the free knee up. Also the free foot is supposed to bend awkardly at the ankle so that the toes point toward the midline of the body and the heel pointing outward. Good times!

Saturday

I woke up with a sore throat but I dragged myself out of bed for an epic 3 hour morning at yet another arena. This one is the best one yet so far! Really good ice and even seating for spectators. The first half hours was called 'skating skills' which is what has replaced school figures here in Canada. Also dance can be practiced at this time. We spent the time working on stroking, crossovers, a mohawk drill and three-turns. Mostly we focused on fixing my bad posture. I enjoyed this session because good skating skills and poise between elements can really lift an average skater to someone that stands out.

After the lesson there was skating lessons for little children, due to a strange ordering of the schedule. They told me I could help out so I stuck around; I ended up teaching groups of kids all by myself :O Fortunately they were not learning anything too complicated. Since I don't really know how to teach I just adopted a 'watch me' type of instruction but it seemed to go alright.

Once the little kids went off the ice we had another group lesson like the one on Monday. We practiced edges down the ice, three turns, mohawks, etc. After that was a smaller group lesson on spins. I thought we would be working on our spins individually, but I saw my coach teaching a group of girls and asked if I can join them. I suppose she will charge me some kind of group lesson rate for that one. Anyway we worked on laybacks (something I have been wanting to learn!) and back sit spins out of a pivot on the toepick. I was not able to do the back sit at all in front of the group, I just immediately fell out of it. My coach says that on Friday nights there is a spin competition, and next week it is sit-change-sit. Even though I am not in this competition, I practiced the back sit and then the whole sit-change-sit combination until I was able to pull a few off! Too bad my coach didn't see them :P

The rest of the time was open freeskate so I worked on all my jumps trying to incorporate all the new things I learned this week. I finally feel a joy in pulling off a good waltz jump, a jump I used to find very uninteresting. I even experimented with split jumps in each direction and the half loop. I experimented with camel-change-camel, which did not get far because I cannot get into the back camel position. I experimented with coming into a back spin from a long RBO edge, which is seriously harder than it looks. I tried a bunch of consecutive three-turns as some kind of precursor to twizzles, but so far I can only do them on one foot in one direction. We capped off the morning by practicing spirals as the coaches contorted me into painful positions at the boards. Practicing these awful things makes my outer hips really sore! They were sore for three days after Monday's practice and they are still sore this evening from yesterday morning.

Sunday

Today I was still not feeling well and slept most of the day but I was foolish enough to play hockey anyway! Our game did not start well and we were down 4-2 before long. But somehow we got a fire lit under us after that and bounced back for an 8-4 win! I made a few good plays. I even managed to fire off a wrist shot from the point. My new goal is to try not to make any bad mistakes that directly lead to a goal against us. It's not as easy as it sounds!

Well it's been a busy weekend, I can't wait to have some tea and go to bed.