This week in ice sports

I had another busy week, just the way I like it!

• Saturday: Figure skating practice, including skills lesson. I had a decent skate and my bracket turns might be getting a teensy bit better. They are seriously hard. And I haven't even learned the backward ones yet! Otherwise my test routines have not really improved all that much. Why? Uhm, lack of practice. You bet.
• Saturday: Hockey game! We played a team with a lot of beginners so I tried to focus on taking my time to make a smart decision with the puck instead of panicking and throwing it away.
• Sunday: Another hockey game, usually I don't play 2 days in a row but they moved one of our games that would have overlapped with the Stanley Cup (how nice!). This time we played a much better team and as usual we were short-handed so this game was a little more ugly. One good moment for me was when I got a half-decent backhand shot on goal from the high slot. Another one was when I did a cool stop-and-turn-around move to lose a check and got away a nice pass.
• Monday: More hockey! Usually I figure skate on Mondays but there was no ice this week, and my team is always shorthanded so I played for the 3rd time in a little over 2 days. These 3 games were like a 'Goldilocks Series'. The first opponent was 'too easy'. The second opponent was 'too hard'. But the third opponent on Monday was 'just right'. We lost 1-0 because I screened my own goalie. Oops!
• Tuesday: Personal training. Sweat was rolling down my nose. Also, my husband has a sudden interest in hockey so we went to public skating and looked in on some games to see if there is a beginner's division for men. I wore my hockey skates and tried to do some backspins. On the first one I fell on my butt because I apparently rely on my toepicks waaay too much. After that I tried to balance more on the ball of my foot the whole time, but the best I could manage was to not fall down. On the bright side, I have pretty decent twizzles in my hockey skates, which I attribute to the lack of toepick. Then I tried a forward spin and fell again. Crap! Kurt Browning can do an Axel in hockey skates.
• Thursday: I found a store that was open late today and ran out there after work to pick up a couple of street hockey pucks. I bought the 'Green Biscuit' puck and the 'Proshot' puck. I also grabbed another stick for home use only. I wanted to try them outside on the road but it started pouring rain as soon as I got home (!). I found a piece of cardboard and put it down on the carpet in the spare room and practiced a little stickhandling, probably for 30 or 40 minutes. I definitely need a bigger piece of something slippery to practice on indoors. My forearms are already sore and that was just a couple of hours ago!