Catching up

I was on vacation last week so I haven't updated for a while.  But in fact I've skated four times since I returned, I've just been too lazy to blog, oops!  Actually I will blame it on the NHK trophy taking up all my time this weekend :)

Friday Morning

I had my usual early morning skate on Friday (Oct  22nd).  Since it is only for one hour I opted to skip figures in favour of having enough time to practice everything else.  After about two weeks off most of my elements were predictably rusty but I wanted to practice everything and get it over with!  I did a whole bunch of stroking exercises including crossovers and power pulls (these really suck).  I worked on all my spins, most of them were not very good and the consistent camel spin I briefly owned was gone (no surprise).  With my coach we ran through all my jumps up to loop. She thinks they are all progressing especially the loop.  She thinks it looks "natural".  But it still feels strange!

Friday Afternoon

Because I missed four sessions I was allowed to make them up so I started by coming to the afternoon session that day.  I had the day off so why not?!  This time there were a bunch of different sessions going on for several hours.  It started with a skating skills time slot that was supposed to last half an hour but the CanSkate coaches started coming in early for the skating lessons and they started laying out cones and drawing on the ice and generally getting in my way so I left a bit early to go across the hall to the other rink where a freeskate was starting.  It was somewhat busy but mostly with small kids so it wasn't too much of a problem. After that the seniors joined us and we had a spin 'competition'.  Since all my spins were still rusty I just worked on a simple upright spin and trying to 'sell' it with good presentation.  Then there was another freeskate session and I worked on more or less everything until I started running out of ideas. I probably could have worked more on spirals an spread eagles and stuff but I'm a bit embarrassed to practice them, hehe.  Also with seniors there I was concentrating a lot on staying out of their way and ended up doing a lot of just skating around at top speed.  I like to skate fast :)  Too bad I can't even do a 3-turn at such speeds.  Eventually I got tired enough to leave even though the session wasn't over, but it was time to go home and my feet were hurting by then. I probably skated for about three hours that afternoon.

Saturday

On Saturday morning I was ridiculously sore from four hours of skating the previous day.  After two weeks off.  But once I am on the ice I usually don't notice it so much.  During skating skills I got to practice my three patterns to the appropriate music.  The 3-turns pattern is feeling more smooth and the choctaws are not as awkward as they used to be. The Mohawks pattern sucks the most because I can't seem to figure out the timing of the music; also I am not as good at doing the pattern with the left foot leading, it's a lot less controlled.  I also got to practice the Dutch Waltz to the music and even though I forgot some of the steps it mostly came back to me.  I still haven't had a dance lesson, something I'd like to rectify. 

For our group lesson we practiced a bunch of straight stroking and Russian stroking  just going down the ice and back in a big line.  I liked this lesson format because less time is wasted waiting for your turn to skate.  We even tried racing down the ice, both forwards and backwards.   I did not do as well as I expected going forwards but was second going backwards!

For my private lesson we worked on my spins.  We worked some more on fixing the travel in my forward upright spin and I was able to centre a couple of them.  But, I don't know how I did it.  My coach says that on the ones that were centred, I was 'pressing down through the ball of the foot' more.  I'm not really sure what this means.  My sit-spin was really not working and I even fell on one of them when I leaned too deeply on the spiraling edge.  I know that I need to spiral into a tighter curve before spinning but I just can't seem to do it. At this point I was getting too frustrated for it to really be productive so we moved on to the camel spin.  It still wasn't as good as it had been before my vacation.  My coach wants me to make a tighter spiraling edge and immediately straighten the free knee.  To practice this I tried skating a spiral down the blue line.  It takes me about halfway across the rink to get into the proper position, it needs to be much quicker than that.  Also need to think about getting both knees absolutely locked as soon as possible or it looks "horrendous". Oh snap!  On the bright side my upright backspin has improved drastically, Coach was surprised, even shocked! So was I!

The rest of the freeskate I mostly spent working on going into my jumps with more speed.  Not top speed, because I get out of control, but usually I practice them at a crawl so I tried to pick it up a bit.  The one this is hardest for is the toe loop.  For some reason this jump is confusing me lately.  Anyway it wasn't all about skating fast, I did do my dreaded jumping exercises including my least favourite one, the toe loop from a standstill.  AND I even got to doing some of the Lutz prep exercises.  Whee!  I did manage to practice some spirals and spread eagles toward the end this time, and got more comfortable with my right foot spiral.

No surprise, I was again ridiculously sore for the rest of the day and Sunday. 

Monday

On Monday I skate for only an hour and it's somewhat crowded, so it's not always the most productive day.  This time my feet were killing me so I had to adjust my skates a couple of times but it can't account for the way the time just flew by.  I worked on crossovers and power pulls a bit, ran through my spins saving the most time for camel, did some spirals, and suddenly it was time for my lesson.  We worked on jumps this time.  Some days my coach seems happy with them and sometimes she just picks them apart, and this time she picked them apart.  She would fix one thing, and something else would go wrong.  I think I was a bit distracted by all the other skaters or something, I wasn't focusing enough.  But we did manage to get each jump to a point where I could do one or two that was ok.  I hate it when my coach has to say the same things over and over, it's a waste of her breath and we both waste time and energy, but there is so much to think about at once it's really tough to get them all right at once.

The group lesson on Mondays is also kind of a wash because there are so many of us and they choose exercises where we sort of cross paths and it gets chaotic.  We practiced cross rolls and skiing and skiing with a turn.  One exercise that I just didn't get involved some kind of backward cross-in-front step followed by a double three-turn.  When I tried it I was told that I had turned the wrong way but I couldn't really figure out what I was supposed to do.  Sometimes this sort of thing happens in a group lesson.  They did finally split us up into 2 groups toward the end and we practiced doing a BO 3-turn followed by FI Mohawk.  We practiced them CCW but ran out of time for doing them CW.  And the coaches wonder why we don't practice everything in both directions! LOL!