Caught on Video

So on Monday I had a terrible session. Like some kind of bad joke, my stellar session on Friday was followed up by a stinker. I was annoyed, but I tried to take Gary Beacom's advice to focus on what was positive about the session and put it behind me. I thought hard and came up with one positive: that I went.
After a day off, I went back today with a good attitude, and managed to do a quick off-ice warmup this time (I like to do 20 minutes, but on Monday I didn't have time for any). I didn't land my Axel out of the gate, but I was feeling good and eventually worked up the courage to just go for it, in spite of how strange it feels. I even managed to do an OK Axel for the camera, so now you know it's not a Unicorn or a Dragon or Snuffalupagus!

Get on the Axel Train

Something amazing happened on Friday night, my Axel suddenly clicked for some reason! I have been consistently managing a couple of under rotated, wobbly Axels from a T-position most sessions for a couple of years now. But progress has been slow putting it onto the circle to get some flow on the landing. The tiny bit of extra speed usually freaks me out and I end up popping the jump and doing a two-footed little dance while leaning forward ridiculously to complete the rotation on the ice.

A year ago, I started getting occasional lessons on the jump harness. It was a real life-changing experience! Finally, I could hurl myself into the air without fear. I started landing really fabulous Axels on the harness. I learned what it felt like to land one, on one foot, and rotated. I also picked up a lot more technique over the last year, not necessarily because of the harness, but the harness did let me experiment on techniques without fear.  Unfortunately, having great Axels on the harness did not immediately translate into results off the harness, because I still get spooked. I have seen people take a lot of bad falls, and even had a couple myself. Some people call it “being chicken”, but I prefer to think of it as a “strong survival instinct”.

Me and my coaches seem to have two different approaches to tackling my Axel:

1) Look for technical fixes

2) Try to fix my brain

Approach 1 usually degenerates into nitpicking over some irritating detail. I have literally had sessions where my Axel got worse the longer I tried to fix it. On the other hand, it’s important to fix technical mistakes and I have definitely improved on that.

Approach 2 is decidedly challenging, but often my best Axels happen when I shut my brain off and just go for it. As for getting over the fear, the harness has helped somewhat, and I wear a lot of padding. But that only helps so much.

The reality is that at some point you have to step out of your comfort zone and do something that scares you. My coach has told me so many times that it has to “feel weird” because what I am comfortable with is wrong. My excuse was always that it felt like something is wrong with the jump, but often when I look at videos, it’s not that bad, I just freak out because it feels weird.

Over the last couple weeks I made a few discoveries:

• Don’t rush the takeoff
• Jump up as high as possible 
• Make a tight air position
• Stand up straight on landing

I know, right? Sounds obvious right? I’ve only been told all these things a zillion times but there are so many things to remember in a manoeuvre that takes like half a second, it’s hard to consistently add more things. Anyway, the last couple weeks I had been doing “ok” and feeling confident but still only managing a handful of decent attempts in a session, but nothing that I would call a breakthrough.

On Friday night I went to the rink after work, and the first two T-position Axels went well. But it’s impossible to land them with any flow, because there’s no momentum, so I usually end up hopping around trying to get my balance. So I decided to do one on the circle, from a back edge, with a tiny bit of speed. To be honest, I have landed them  this way only a handful of times, and really well only once.

Well, I landed the first one. It was not perfect. It did not have an easy, flowing exit edge. It was pre-rotated on the take off and cheated on the landing.   But it was on foot, with some speed, and I was shocked! I let out a yelp of surprise and triumph. I waved my arms in the air. I bragged to my friends. I took a photo of the landing edge.

When you’re 33, and you learned the Axel as an adult, you are allowed to make a big deal about it.

Well I decided to do another one, and I landed that one too. Woo hoo! I could hardly believe it. I have probably never landed two in a row like that before. 

I got a friend to take video, to see if I could capture the moment. But I had lost all my mojo. I was so excited to get it on video, I started rushing and falling into old habits. So I put my camera away.

Then I started landing them again, with my camera safely out of sight. Some of them were bad and scratchy. Some of them were very under rotated. Sometimes I was leaning forward so badly on the landing that it was awkward to finish off. Sometimes I fell. But I stopped freaking out and popping them. I stopped doing a two foot dance. 

I did so many Axels on that session, I lost count. Again and again, I just kept popping them off. I even decided they were fun. I wanted to enjoy that feeling as long as possible. Not only was it such a great feeling to actually execute the jump, I wanted to cement some muscle memory of how to do it correctly. I thought they were going to have to kick me off, but then I rolled my ankle when I started getting tired, and I decided I’d had enough.

How did I do it? Somehow I managed to convince myself to stay in the backspin position in spite of every instinct telling me it was a bad idea. And because I kept landing it, maybe my brain was starting to connect the dots - that holding the position = easy landing, and not a big scary painful tumble. 

So how will I do tomorrow? Usually for me, I take one step forward and one step back. And I will be stressed out that maybe I can’t repeat my success from Friday. And then usually if I don’t repeat my successes I get sulky. But I think I need to look at this differently. I have come really far with my skating and I know consistency is difficult for me. Maybe I will land more Axels, maybe I won’t. But now I have an experience that I will never forget.  At least for that one hour, I had a consistent Axel. And OMG it was so much fun!

Sessions like that are rare, but they make it all worth while. All the early mornings, late nights, sore muscles, toe pick belly flops, bruised knees, cut fingers, running through the fog in the dark to catch the bus, getting changed in bathroom stalls, blowing off friends at the pub, tedious drills, suffering through session after session of crappy skating, hours of off-ice jumps, and on and on. We persevere through it all because the exhilaration of achieving new heights is such a great feeling.

Epic Lesson

I had a fantastic skate on Saturday :D
It started with skating skills, which was relatively empty due to the Thanksgiving holiday. I practiced my three routines to the appropriate music (a three-turn sequence, a mohawk sequence, and held edges on a circle in all 8 flavours). The music for the mohawk sequence seems a bit fast and I'm having a hard time hearing the beat so I don't have the hang of the timing yet. I'll have to get some help with that.

Then we had skating lessons for kids as usual (CanSkate). I taught my own group again, and it is getting easier now that I have taught this level a few times. As long as I stay with this level I'm good! They were having trouble with their two-foot turns, so I got them to practice "doing the twist" by just standing and swiveling their hips back and forth and it helped a whole lot. It's also a good chance to practice spinning in the opposite direction.

For the group lesson we did an intense crossovers workshop, ugh. My coach wants us to be able to hold the underpush without bending forward, but it's just so hard on my old knees and back. I started going to a physiotherapist recently though so I am hoping he can help me get into these awkward poses that my coach keeps trying to contort me into.

After that it was time for group spin lesson, but all my coach's other students were away so I got to have a private lesson for that plus the duration of freeskate :) We weren't really planning to use the entire 75 minutes for a private lesson but we were having such a great time that we just kept going. Next week I am away on vacation so it is just lesson time that I would have had later anyway. Plus I think my coach was happy to be employed that whole time!

I did in fact have a terrific lesson. We covered just about everything. We talked about testing and competing. We even got to three new jumps. Whee!

• One-foot upright spin: for the test, the want the free leg brought in beside the skating leg, not crossed in front like a scratch spin. I practiced one of these and was told "that was a really nice spin". Currently I'm holding the knee bend for quite a long time and was rewarded with one well-centred spin to boot.
• Sit-spin: more work on pointing the free foot forwards and up, not out to the side. The position coach likes feels like my toe is pointing to the left, but it's actually pointing forward. To centre them I need to spiral in farther on the entry and get more lean over the left foot; feel the blade really biting the ice. I feel the lean on the entry but once I get spinning I sort of fall inward. We made some progress on this including keeping the free leg straight on the swing around. Coach says they look more appealing now when I get everything right. Still need to work on deeper sit position off-ice.
• Camel spin: need to make the entry more smooth and really extend, almost lock both knees. I practiced two. The second one really felt good and coach says it's perfect, she doesn't want to mess with it. Only suggestion is to not lift the free leg so high, think more of getting an outward or even upward turn of the free foot/toe. And fold more forwards and square the shoulders. Pretty nice considering how awful this spin was two months ago.
• Backspin: bleah. I fall to the outside edge and scrape the ice; also have a real comfort zone problem with the free leg being in any other position except crossed in front of my skating leg. I told coach that I'm not thinking of my body position because I'm trying to find the right spot on my blade, but she thinks it should be more the other way around; a proper body position will naturally lead to balancing on the proper part of the blade. Aim for keeping the hips level, free thigh parallel to the ice, free foot directly in front of skating knee. Toe pointed. Duh.
• Attitude spin: didn't get too far with this, I'm having trouble figuring out if the free knee has to move behind the line of the body. We seem to be having a communications disconnect on this one. Anyway, idea is to work on a regular upright spin entry with free leg about 45 degrees out from the midline of the body. Then bend the free knee and try to make the free ankle point to the ceiling. Haha. One good exercise is to try this just gliding down the ice. This is hard. Did I mention the toe should be pointed?
• Waltz jump: we worked on the dreaded exercise and she claims it shows that I've been practicing it. No comment on the step forward, so I'm not sure if I'm doing it right yet. I've been trying to think about pivoting on the ball of the foot instead of deepening the curve. We had a bit of a discussion about how I can't absorb all of her great feedback at once, and I'm better at thinking about one thing at a time. She told me to try a jump without thinking about it; apparently that one was quite good. *shrug*. Also tried setting it up from backward crossovers. Scary fast!
  
• Salchow: coach thinks it looks quite nice, not too much feedback here. Remember to BEND the knees, and jump from the deepest knee bend without hesitation. Practice holding the check after the three-turn more.
  
• Toe loop: one thing I noticed on Friday is that when I look at my toe-loop tracing the toe-pick mark is at an outward angle to the direction of the glide. I think this means I am opening the hip of the picking foot before picking, which is probably a cheat. I focused on keeping the hips more square and coach thinks it looks much better. I still need to consciously sweep the skating foot toward the picking foot more closely before jumping.
• Loop: some serious improvement here. We are pleased that I am over my mental block on entering the jump from a backward two-foot glide and am managing something better than a bent-over hop. Need to get the timing of arms and legs more co-ordinated (this is true for all the jumps). One neat bit of advice was to turn the ankle of the jumping (right) foot so that the toepick is pointing down and to the right. So the ankle is flopping in a bit to the left side, and try to jump outwards not just upwards.
• Flip: After all this coach mused that I am almost ready to move on to the flip, so why not try it? I told her it is my favourite jump and I'm worried she will take the fun out of it, haha. So she had me show her my flip and she said "Wow, I don't want to take the fun out of that for you!" She thinks the jump is pretty good. :D But I am rotating too much on the ice, need to think about pick, jump, rotate in that order. She also showed me her preferred method to set up the jump.
• Lutz: since we are on a roll we moved on to the dreaded Lutz. I told her I have been too afraid to try it. She had me practice the setup from a clockwise glide on the hockey circle, same as waltz but without looking back and going the other direction (feels very strange). Then practice reaching back with the right foot, and move right arm back even farther. Then we tried the pick and jump in two ways: pick and jump but don't rotate; and try the pick and jump and rotate from a standstill. Then pick, jump, and rotate from the gliding setup. I managed to squeak out a couple of crappy ones. Whee!
• Bunny hop: We had not talked about these a lot but they are on the first freeskate test so I got to practice them a bit. Learned what to do with my arms, LOL.
  
• Mazurka: I had never learned these before but they are pretty easy. It's not easy to make them look really amazing though. Especially in my non-dominant direction.
  
• Footwork: we talked about it a bit and I showed her some of the stuff I had been experimenting with last Saturday. Then she tried to teach me how to do a bracket which was pretty much "do this" and "your way sucks" LOL! Well we were out of time so I'm sure next time she will bombard me with her usual plethora of technical tidbits.

I had a lot of fun in this lesson and was pleased we got to talking about programs, testing, and competing. Coach wants me to suggest some music. Too bad all my favourite tunes have vocals! I guess I could stand to skate to the Star Wars soundtrack. But it would be a bit goofy, especially at my age.

Wow!

I almost didn't go to public skating tonight, but I'm sure glad I did. When I arrived there was only ONE other person on the ice. I couldn't believe it! Usually Sunday night is well attended. Some more people did eventually show up but it was never more than ten of us or so on the ice at once. Under such conditions it was so terrific I stayed for the second session, even though they turn the lights out and put on disco lights which make skating a bit more disorienting. I think the ice is in better condition too, it was much smoother than usual.

I practiced just about everything I could think of and had trouble of thinking of stuff to work on sometimes because I had already tried everything. I was having a fabulous day for camels! I could get used to this. I practiced my camel-layback-change-sit combination with some success. I even tried camel-change-camel and managed about one revolution of the back camel. I did about a thousand backspins and my problem with them currently is that I am leaning so much into my outside edge that my blade scrapes deeply and I lose my balance. This was difficult to correct however. Sometimes I manage a decent back spin but I can't exit them properly, this will take some work.

All in all, it was about 2 hours of skating, really fun. I hope my camel stays with me when I get on the ice tomorrow.

After the skating I noticed some ladies filing into the changeroom and suspected they might be with the synchro club. I asked them and indeed, they were synchro skaters. I talked to a couple of them for a while, they are really nice ladies and I love the idea of skating with other women my age. Unfortunately they usually practice at another arena on another night when I am busy >:( There just aren't enough hours in the week to do all the activities I want to do!

Yawn

I have been very busy! To summarize, I accumulated about four more hours of skating in the last two days. I am skating well and having fun!

Friday

Morning skate:

• Figures: FO8. This time I got the first quarter of the circles to be in the right spot, when going without markings. But, the left circle is too large and the right circle is too small. Also after inspecting the tracings, the second half of the circles are being traced mostly on a flat instead of an edge >:( I never checked this before.
• Skating skills: Learned the new 'Watzing Mohawks' pattern with my coach and practiced both it and the three-turns pattern. She thinks they are almost testable; I want them to be breathtaking to watch.
• Freeskate elements: A bit of a blur now, but I mostly concentrated on spins I think. Also spirals, I practiced forward spirals on each foot, on flat, inside, and outside edges. Discovered that change-edge spirals are not as easy as regular change-edge glides.

Physiotherapy Appointment:

• I finally decided to go see a physio about my chronic knee and back problems. He says I have too much of an anterior pelvic tilt (i.e. I stick my butt and tummy out); this was not news to me. But I actually learned a lot at the appointment, he did a very thorough assessment of the flexibility in my legs and hips.
  
• Punchline: stretch quadriceps and psoas muscles, strengthen left gluteus medius, improve posture.

Evening skate:

• With my husband out of town and me being an ice-aholic, I went to public skate at the rink where I already have a pass. For about half an hour I had a wonderful time spinning and it was not too crowded to boot. I practiced backspins in upright and sit positions and found it helpful to keep the skating knee bent. I also practiced forward upright spins trying to reduce travel and found that keeping a deep knee bend helped some of the time. I experimented with attitudes and camels with some success.
• After that they announced over the PA that figure skating was not allowed! I threw my hands in the air and muttered 'Since when?' I have been skating at this rink's public sessions for over two months and always there is a collection of us figure skating in the centre of the rink. We don't cause trouble. And yet when I went a couple of weeks ago there were two boys kicking a puck around and teenagers pushing eachother around while sitting on those useless plastic contraptions for beginners, but I didn't hear any announcements about that. I had to speak to these kids myself. Who's more of a danger?
• After the ridiculous ban on figure skating I decided to buck up and practice my basic skating skills like stroking, power pulls, two-foot slaloms, two-foot slalom turns, FO and FI three-turns, Mohawks, swing rolls, cross rolls, etc. It's tough to practice crossovers in that environment except forwards CCW going around the ends. I wish they would have us at least change directions at this rink. I had originally planned to stay for the second hour but with freestyle banned I just wasn't into it, and anyway my knees were sore.

Saturday

• Skills lesson: we ran through the last pattern on the first skills test, which essentially consist of doing several crossovers then holding an edge for 12 counts going around a hockey circle. There are variants for each of the eight edges of course. My coach watched me do each of them and said these are a piece of cake for me because I did figures. After the backward outside edge, she said "Do you know how long it takes me to teach my students how to get into that gliding position that you just did?!" She seemed relieved! The only one I had to do-over was my LBI edge. Not a strong edge for me. Coach thinks I could test these next week. Whee! After that I asked her to look at my crossovers and we got through 3/4 types before running out of time. She did not have a lot of corrections except to keep the free outside leg straight when bringing it around on forward crossovers.
• Group lesson: we practiced some fun new moves like a change-edge with three-turn tacked on, and two backward cross-steps with three toe-steps (not sure of proper names for these moves). I was surprised that the coach running the lesson (not my private coach) put me at the front of one of the lines. There were more advanced skaters there that should have been at the front of the line. I suppose it was some kind of vote of confidence :)
• Spin group lesson: we started with camels and I was having a good camel day. I even pulled off one of my best ones with everyone watching! I almost cheered! Then we practiced backspins and I had less success >:( I hate those things. Coach wanted us to practice Biellmans next and I just laughed, so she said I could just watch. I was dreading getting to the extreme flexibility stuff, but they can't make me do it. None of that Gumby stuff is technically required, and falls more into the sport of gymnastics in my opinion.
• Freeskate: I dutifully practiced everything including all my jumps that I have been working on. Even my loop is a bit less embryonic. They all feel more solid but my coach hasn't watched them in a while, so I'm not sure how they are looking. Guess I should stop putting off another jump lesson. My favourite jump is the flip, but my coach hasn't worked on that one with me yet; I'm sure she will pick it apart when it's time. I noodled around with fun spin combinations like camel-layback-backsit, of course they're all very much in the developmental stages. But I had fun and even managed to look up at the ceiling in one of my proto-laybacks and didn't fall over! It left me pretty dizzy though. I had a fabulous day for camels. Then I had a blast making up footwork building on he stuff we did in group lesson. One of the moves just begged to have a spin tacked onto the end so I had fun doing that and also throwing in some split jumps and split jump followed by a toe loop. I used to be very bad at making up footwork, I am pleased to be improving in that area as well.
• I checked with a staff member if freestyle is allowed at this rink's imminent public skate, and she assured me that it is not, not even backwards skating. I gave her a bit of a hard time about it and she acknowledged that I must know how to control myself on the ice and not cause trouble, but freestyle is not allowed for anyone nonetheless. I left it at that. All the better for it, I saved my money and was tired and ready for lunch anyway.
  
• Stretching: It was a beautiful day today (weird for October) so I took my yoga mat outside and did some stretches, including the stuff from physio. I had some good progress with my left foot forward splits, my front calf is almost grazing my mat. Splits in the other direction still have a long way to go.
  

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.

Camel Progress and Group Lesson

Today I had my second figure skating session of the new season. This was at the same wonderful arena as Friday. Unfortunately they were having some kind of problem with the environmental controls in the rink and there was a mild fog hovering over the ice. To make matters worse, the condensation was reaching the rafters and subsequently dripping off them, creating stalactite-like lumps of yellow gunk on the ice. It was such a contrast to the pristine ice conditions on Friday! I hope they get the problem fixed soon.

I spent some time working on some three-turn drills my coach taught me and built up some confidence in my jumps. I should be able to create big, strong, technically good single jumps one day, but first I need a bit more confidence. Today the level of the skaters was mostly not as high as the group I had been skating with in the summer, so I didn't hang around the boards and watch, I practiced all my jumps except for the Lutz (I am still afraid of it). Probably my technique is crap, but I am working on getting comfortable with landings and making my jumps less curly. The rest I will leave up to my coach to deal with in due time.

My lesson went very well today, much better than Friday. We spent some time on my camel spin and established that I can reach a good position just standing around at the boards, but my free foot does not lift high enough in the actual spin, plus I am not folded forwards enough. These will come with practice as I build muscle memory, especially by practicing spirals. Coach taught me to lean slightly to the left so that my centre of gravity comes more over the pivot point. After that tip I was able to pull one amazing camel spin out of nowhere! It was probably 5 revolutions and I could have held it longer but I had a perverse sense of not wanting to waste my coach's time. Of course I tried three more after that and they all sucked, but there is so much to think about at once, I just need to keep practicing. Coach claims that she sees potential in my camel and that it could be spectacular one day. That was exciting!

After the camel we did some obligatory waltz jump work which was not too exciting but I suppose that waltz jumps are a foundation of sorts for the other jumps so I see the value in the exercises. I am building a bit of edge control now and she thinks I can move on to the second phase which involves straightening the free leg in front on the landing rather than bending it in my phase 1 drill. Again there are so many things to remember at once, but it will just take time. I teach group fitness and I am always shouting out technical details that I don't even have to think about anymore, so the same can happen with my skating if I practice enough.

After my private lesson, there was a group lesson with 2 other coaches I hadn't met before. Apparently I was the new person in the group so they asked me to introduce myself and made me feel welcome. We practiced some drills skating around in crossovers at one end of the ice and then doing some kind of fancy move to the other end of the ice, then more crossovers. Each move was done forwards, then backwards. I got to try doing forward and backward cross rolls, backward changes of edge, and apparently some choctaws. They didn't really look like what I thought choctaws were, and the drill was a bit unclear and we ran out of time so I am looking forward to practice them again. The backward crossrolls were awkward at first but I got better at them and are actually kind of fun. I would like to have really good skating skills so learning moves like this is just what I want out of a lesson.

After this, there was public skating for a dollar (!) which I couldn't pass up and my sister joined me to get some practice on her hockey skates. At this rink there was not even one other low freestlye skater so I got some cheers from two little girls that worshipped my sad one-foot spin that travelled embarassingly across the ice. I tried to teach them how to do a two-foot spin and they told me I should be a skating teacher, LOL! Even practicing my back cross rolls seemed to catch people's attention and it was a little amusing to go from the worst of a bunch of figure skaters to the star of public skating!