Just more good Saturday ice

Yesterday morning I had a good skate. I always like Saturdays :) I arrived early enough to warm up a bit and do my jumps on the floor.

• Skills lesson: We did run-throughs of all 3 patterns with the music and did some fine tuning especially of the pattern with all the 3-turns. My coach fixed a spot where I was keeping the free foot behind instead of bringing it in front. On the LBO 3-turn I am on too deep of a forward edge after the turn and have a hard time holding it for the required 4 counts without falling over! I need to practice that one. My coach says the power circles are a lot better but I should probably make the circles a bit bigger, there was one time I got too far around and messed up the transition to the next circle. She also fixed another problem with my free leg in this one. The change 3's pattern is pretty good I just need to clean up the first backward change edge a bit, and I think it will be ok.
• Group lesson: My toes are always frozen when we start this from the 45-minute CanSkate lessons we run between these two segments. We practiced the routine we are going to run for the year-end show in March. So far it's not nearly as long as the one we did at Christmas, I'm not sure if we're going to make it longer or what. The coaches weren't too happy with our spirals and leg pulls from the routine so we practiced them after that a bit more.
• Spin patch: My toes were still frozen so spinning was hard! Sometimes in spin patch we focus on one spin and other times we practice a lot of spins. Today we did a lot of different ones but because we kept moving on I didn't really get to practice making corrections. We did upright backspins and backsits. I had 2 bad falls on the backsits. Too much attack and when I hook the spin I can't control the spin with so much energy involved. After that I didn't much feel like doing any more of them. We also did sit-change-sit, back camels, and flying camels. My coach says that I have the timing right on when to 'fly' the camel, but the rest of it is not very good yet.
• Freeskate: I didn't get a private lesson today because my coach is prepping her other skaters for a competition coming soon. This was fine because I had a long jump lesson the previous day (usually my lessons are only 20 minutes). That meant I had a whole hour to practice anything I wanted, and my toes were finally thawed! I practiced my jumps just like Coach wants. She insists that I just need to get in more repetitions and then I will be able to make the nanosecond corrections that she wants. So I did at least 5 of each jump although I probably scrimped on the toe loop, I prefer to do them in combination. I even practiced my Lutz. It's hard to do the jump without disrupting the flow of momentum from the original direction. What an awkward jump, blech. After jumps I did a whole lot of spins, including going back to that backsit and they are tentative but ok. I practiced really whipping into my camel spin with a tight spiraling edge and it is really working for me! Sometimes it is just ok but other times I really get everything right and when I hook the spin I can also feel that it's centred and then it's much easier to hold the spin. It's also faster, I think I had a couple that were 3 revolutions. That used to be extremely rare! I didn't fall out of any of them :) After that I practiced some spirals and leg pulls, power pulls and cross rolls. Nobody was using the music so I practiced 2 of my Skills patterns again but I had to modify them a bit to keep from crashing into other skaters.
• Spin competition: today's spin was....dum dum dum, the stupid backsit. We practiced them a bit more and I had a couple of good ones, but I also fell some more. When it was time to do them one at a time, mine was pretty good but Coach pointed out that it's not low enough, and the free leg is too bent. After that we practiced them again so she could pick a winner. I did one really good one right off the bat! I tried to get lower and straighten the free leg and it felt like it must have looked fantastic. Then after that I fell about 3 times in a row. I probably fell 10 times today on that stupid backsit! After 3 hours on the ice I think I was just getting tired and losing focus that's all. Anyway I didn't get picked as the winner although the coach said that I had had some good ones. For next week we will do the flying camel spin and we had a 5-minute tutorial on it. The coach drew a diagram on the ice and showed us that the jump has to keep spinning, you can't jump straight out. She had a Sr. Bronze girl show us her flying camel (it is beautiful). She whips around on her toepick on the jump so that when she lands she is still spinning. Then it was our turn. My parents happened to be in town and came to watch part of my skate, and my fabulous Dad captured a nice piece of learning that went on. When I tried my flying camel, I jumped straight out instead of around. The coach saw it and pointed out my mistake. Then she encouraged me to try it again with more whipping action. The one I did after that is my best one ever and I partially corrected the mistake. Awesome! Unfortunately we were out of time after that but I can't wait to practice them again.