Bonus Ice

I was feeling bummed out about three days off the ice (horrors!) so I spent a bit of time doing what I could.

1. I made soakers for my blades by following these instructions from Ice Mom. They were so easy, and now I don't have to worry about my blades getting damaged by the other things in my bag, and vice-versa. Thanks Ice Mom!
   
2. Scoured the web for more ice time. I found early morning ice with the club in the next town over, but the bus doesn't start running early enough to get me there :O Also found early ice at another rink but just wasn't jazzed about the logistics of how I was going to make it to this rink, then to work, then to yoga class, not to mention being out of the house for 16 hours (I draw the line at about 13 generally). However I did discover that I can spend almost the entire weekend skating since all the public skates seem to be packed into the weekend, but that is just a bit much for my bad knees and back.

In my search I did stumble across a good session though, an Adult Skate on Thursday nights at a rink that is not that far from the gym where I teach aerobics on Thursday night. It even starts just after my class ends, and this week I have the car so there was nothing stopping me from going. I spent all day yesterday and today looking forward to it! The arena is brand new and I had never been to it before, it's quite beautiful. The ice was in good condition and no fog :) The only thing that was lame was that there was a group lesson going on in the far end, so they coned off approximately half of the area from the blue line onward. This was reasonable, but after a while they moved the cones to the blue line, which sort of crunched the rest of us in a bit more. The silly thing was that the lessons weren't really occupying the new space. I saw a couple talking to the ice monitors shortly after the cones were moved, I wonder if they were giving them an earful about it. But the cones stayed at the blue line nonetheless.

I had never been to an adult skate before but it was really cool. No kids darting around, no hordes of teenagers, and not even crowded. If we had had the whole surface it would have been dreamy.

What did I work on? I tried to practice my new skills patterns but there were still too many people in the way and with so much of the ice coned off anyway it was not really worth it. I can practice them tomorrow morning and first thing on Saturday. I spent a lot of time just noodling around with three-turns and mohawks, not really trying to do anything specific. I tried some brackets and loops too. I practiced my stroking and crossovers, and they are sloppy. Too much toe-pushing and toe scratching, yuck. I did power pulls (i.e. one-foot slaloms) and they are also sloppy so I practiced them for longer than I expected that I would.

I did a lot of spinning. Scratch, proto-layback (aka, attitude?) sit, back scratch, back sit, and even a bit of camel. I am tacking a back sit onto most of my forward spins just for the extra practice. One thing I realized after thinking about recently is that on my camel entrance I tend to step out too far. This puts my centre of mass behind my skating foot, which spells disaster because I can never get it back over my skating foot, especially once I get into the camel position, forget it. This time I tried to get my weight over my skate from the very beginning and it seemed to help. Now I don't fall out of the camel that often, it is just slow. Whee! Slow camel is better than always-falling-over camel. My backspins still suck. 'Nuff said. My forward sit-spin and upright spin still travel and I can feel that I don't have my weight over my skate. I'll need to get my coach to help me fix that.

I experimented with a bit of opposite-direction spinning just for fun. It feels so wrong. But it would be cool to have just one clockwise spin in my repertoire, you don't see skaters that can spin both ways every day.

Oh, my double-agency is out of the bag - one of my hockey team girls was there tonight! She seemed surprised to learn that I also figure skate! I am curious if the team will razz me about it a bit, heh. Hockey players tend to notice the artistic, dance-type features of skating more than they notice the hard falls, strength and control that it takes to excel at it. Not that I am actually doing any of those things :S

Just another day

Today I had another skate, and it was pretty average. In fact, the ice was abyssimal again. Condensation dripped from the rafters again and in addition to the bumps it was creating, the ice was frosty. It was the worst ice I've ever skated on, and I even complained to the manager afterwards. He said, 'what was wrong with it?' Ack!

Thee bad ice made it hard to do backspins and one-foot slaloms. Most everything else was ok as long as I avoided the bumps. I practiced my waltzing threes again, an I enjoy them. I had to modify it a bit sometimes to avoid the other skaters, so I am looking forward to being able to practice them on Friday morning on a nearly-empty rink. I ran through my jumps and they are about where I left them. Last time I did not really feel like jumping so it is good that I felt like it this time. My new-style loop jump is an ugly duckling, but I'm over my mental block of not being able to jump from the backward two-foot glide. The jump is just crappy, that's all. Better than no jump at all!

For my lesson I asked to work on the layback and the camel. For the layback, my coach says that I am rocking up on to my toe when I bring the leg behind. Instead I need to 'press into the ball of my foot'. She also suggested keeping the skating knee slightly bent, at least for now. I'm not sure if she eventually wants it straight or not. She's not too excited about my free foot position, but I told her I will have to work on it off the ice because it is just a flexibility thing.

As for the camel, we worked mostly on the entrance. Coach still wants me to spiral into a deeper curve, and by the end of the curve to be in the full spiral position. She told me again that my camel really has potential, that it will be spectacular one day! I will have to take her word for it, but it is exciting to hear nonetheless. Actually she says it is my best spin, which is a bit of a double-edged sword because I thought my other spins were ok, so now it means they were even crappier than my camel. But perhaps she's referring to the extreme amounts of travel my other spins suffer from, in which case it is probably a fair assessment.

That was it for my lesson, in addition to getting some skating skills printouts that I will have to study. Whee!

The group lesson today was more of the same. On Mondays it is always the same, crossovers and various moves down the length of the ice. This time the new thing we got to try was a sequence of turns. I didn't really catch the whole thing but it was something like three back crossovers, a back outside three turn, directly into a mohawk, then four back crossovers (or possibly two) and a back inside three turn, into the mohawk again. We are supposed to practice it in both directions. I didn't get enough time to practice the whole thing but I got the gist of it so I should be able to try it again on Friday.

Now there are three long dull days before I get to skate again. Boo! I will just have to settle for doing what I can off the ice.

OW!

Yesterday, I had my first session with a personal trainer. I had never had a personal trainer before, but I have always wanted to get one. I am hoping that she can help me with my skating while working around some problems I have with my knees and lower back. I wasn't really sure what to expect but she definitely kicked my ass! She had me do shuttle runs across the floor, walking lunges, jumping lunges, and isometric squats. That part alone had my legs burning like crazy! Then I did more squats with the Olympic bar, and some upper body exercises. Then she had me do one legged squats in my sit-spin position. She had a clever idea which was to put a wobble board under my heel. This simulated the heel of my skating boot and made the exercise a little easier. I also did lots of one-legged hops moving forward, backward, and side-to-side. I hope that that all this will help me jump higher and squat lower over time. I am going to meet with her every Sunday for a while. Today I was ridiculously sore so I hope it will not be quite so bad next week.

Additionally I had a hockey game yesterday! It was a busy day! I did not play super great and did not meet my goal of not screwing up too much, but I did try a couple of new things. I tried carrying the puck up the boards by barreling through everybody instead of just chopping at it. I also tried making a cool Bobby-Orr like move in the offensive zone but it didn't really pan out. No matter, I had fun, and we won 4-3! My next game is on Halloween. Spooky!

Waltzing Threes

I had a better session today. We began with something fun and new! My coach taught me a dance-like pattern that is on the first skating skills test. It is a clockwise pattern of three-turns, crossovers and steps that covers the whole ice surface, called 'Waltzing Threes'. It is actually quite fun and I am looking forward to practicing it again. My coach is going to photocopy the pattern for me, because I am still a bit fuzzy about how the pattern goes in the corners of the rink. Strangely, I have not been able to find information about the Skate Canada test content online, even though all of the USFSA test content is available online. So I will have to rely on my coach for now. I hate not being able to find things online!

After the skills session was the CanSkate class (learn to skate). This time I did not have to teach by myself, whew! I helped out with organizing the kids and mostly shouting gems of wisdom like 'Arms up! Feet together!'.

In the group lesson we practiced some weird pattern of edge changes I had never done before. I did not really get to see what the whole thing was, and I was so far back in the line that by the time it was my turn, the other students were doing the pattern back toward me and we had to swerve out of eachothers' way. So that was a bit of an annoying waste of time. After that we switched to more useful drills in a better format. I like the group lessons, but sometimes we try to practice so many moves that I only get to do each one once or twice. I will have to practice them more on my own.

We had another group spin lesson too and my backspin seems to be progressing. My coach doesn't like my free leg position, but this is an improvement over not being able to do the spin at all. Then, she broke my sit-spin!! I have a toe-out, heel-in, foot-on-an-angle position with my free foot in my sit-spin that my coach does not like. Now when I try to have the foot vertical (but pointed), I get even more unbalanced in the spin and travel/fall out. So I am a bit irked that now I can't do a sit-spin. I need to find out which is the more serious offense, an "ugly" foot position or gross traveling. In my opinion traveling is worse but I will ask my coach's opinion. I know that I also don't squat down enough but she seems willing to let that slide for the moment. That is a relief, because I have knee problems and it will take some time at physiotherapy to improve my range of motion in the knee.

Then it was time for freeskate and I spent twenty minutes on my camel spin. I don't normally spend so much time on it but it was taking forever to really warm up. I did spirals and stretches, but it took quite some time to get comfortable. I did manage several respectable if slow camels, but the rest of them all failed in a fall/lean to the inside. I know I need to lean to the outside of my supporting foot, but somehow it's just not translating into actually doing it.

During this experience I began to get frustrated, again. It is hard when you have a good skate (like I did last Saturday) and then the next time or two, or seven, you suck. It is easy to be fooled into thinking that each practice, you will do the same or better as the last. This is completely untrue in figure skating, at least in my experiences both as a child and as an adult. Memories of frustration and exasperation started coming back to me. This became worse as I discovered my broken sit-spin when trying to fix the free foot position, and then when an elite skater commandeered the ice. I had to keep forcing myself to continue for the rest of the session.

I would like to bitch and moan about this elite skater for a moment. Today he spent about twenty minutes working on a triple toe loop. This meant that he would be skating at full blast across two-thirds of the rink surface. At one point I realized that most of us were crammed into the other third of the ice, working on our elements at low speed because there was no room. Then, when he practiced his program I made sure to stand at the boards when he came by, but he still skated WITHIN ONE INCH OF ME. Sorry, I cannot move back any more! It is not reasonable to expect me to sit in the penalty box for the entire duration of his program when I have paid for the ice too. Then, to make it even more disgusting, his run-through mostly featured popped jumps that were poorly landed, so it felt even more so like wasted time. I wish this fellow was in a different session! Our session is labelled Intermediate/Senior so I suppose he is entitled to attend it. However it is also the session with all the new freeskaters like me working on bad waltz jumps and shaky backspins. The next most elite skater is powerful and has an axel and is working on doubles, but I have not had any problems with her. Probably there is nothing I can do about it though, and in general all the other time slots I am in are full of the same level skaters so I had not even had a single problem until today.

Anyway, speaking of bad waltz jumps, I diligently practiced my waltz jump prep over and over today. I even did the jump this time, but I have lost the sense of joy in it that I briefly experienced. As soon as I jump, I know that my step forward was not executed correctly, so that kind of takes the fun out of it. So mostly I focused on the prep and the step. Through repetition, each piece of technique is slowly absorbed so it is very important. I have the backward push, feet together, and change of arms down pat. Now for the rest of it!

I spent a bit of time working on my other jumps, but I am not feeling too jazzed about them right now. I would rather do them while my coach is watching because I know they are flawed. Since my coach fixed my swinging Salchow free leg, the jump feels like a wretched little thing and I'm not much inclined to inflict its ugliness on whomever might be watching me. However it is better than my loop which has been reduced to a weak hop when I try it with the new entrance. From a three-turn, I have more confidence and the jump is stronger (but probably still flawed). At least it is a jump though! Ah well I will never be a big jumper so I don't feel too bad about slacking off on them.

This week there was a spirals competition, which I am not signed up for (i.e. haven't payed for the time slot). I had entertained the idea of doing it anyway, for the practice, but by the end of the morning my confidence was not that high and I just wanted to go home. When I walked by on my way out of the building I saw them practicing front catch-foot spirals, and was glad of my decision. This ugly spiral is new since I was a child skater, so I never learned how to do it. But I know from yoga classes that I am not flexible enough to do even a passable Level 1 version of it. No need to advertise this in front of a group of 12-year old Gumbies!

This afternoon I spent two hours stretching.

Disappointment

After looking forward to skating this morning so much, I was thoroughly disappointed today with a wasted lesson and crappy skating. The whole 20 minute lesson was spent on the step forward into the waltz jump. At first this was ok, then I started getting frustrated because my coach kept offering useless tidbits like "You look awkward". Well, duh. That's not helpful! Then I started analyzing it in my typical fashion and was also getting frustrated that maybe I'm just too old, inflexible, and injured to be any good at this sport. This attitude did not help.

After the lesson I worked dutifully on the waltz jump prep for another ten minutes or so and then tried some spins. I did not even feel like doing other jumps. All my spins were crap except for the back sit, surprisingly. They traveled pitifully and involved much toe-pick scratching and loss of balance.

This is not the first time I have experienced this type of two steps forward, one step back progress. Figure skating is filled with it and I had much frustration in skating as a child. I tried not to let this one incident get me down, after all I have been having many good sessions lately so one bad one is no big deal. But I still have a sense of wasted time and money, and general disgust with myself. What was extra lame about the whole morning was that I did not have fun, which is the whole point of doing this.

The session was not an entire writeoff because I actually made progress with my figures, of all things. I found this great reference on the web that describes many aspects of skating, including figures:

http://www.worldfigureskating.net/index.php

Since I will basically have to teach myself, I read through the instructions for the forward outside eight and even printed them out and brought them with me in case I needed to check them. I practiced about six eights and then checked out my tracings. I measured them and found them woefully asymmetric. On the start of the circle, I go out too far so my circles are more oval-shaped and off-centre. You are not supposed to use markings but I currently need them as a learning tool, so I measured and marked out the proper locations of the quarter-circles. Then I tried to skate the figure again, hitting all the marks. This felt strange, like I was tracing circles with big bites out of them. But the resulting traces looked more round and smooth. Following the instructions from the website immediately helped my edges be more secure and less wobbly. So I feel very good about this progress, even if it is for a skill I cannot test. In a way, I feel like I am keeping alive a dying art.

In order to make better use of my lesson time I am going to make some rules for myself, which I will try to obey.

• No babbling or extensive analysis
• Try to just do what she says and see what happens
  
• No complaining about being too old, inflexible, etc.
• Don't explain why you did it wrong unless it is useful
• Pay 100% attention

After thinking about my lesson for quite a while today I had one realization that part of my frustration probably stems from a sense of 'already knowing this stuff' and wanting to just skate around and do my thing. Unfortunately what I already know is very technically flawed, and it needs a lot of correcting before I can just skate around, let alone have a program, test, and compete. Part of me is thinking 'I was in two competitions! I could do a lutz! I don't want to do waltz jumps'. This thinking is counterproductive because while I want to have fun, I want to be a good skater, not just someone who competes at the lowest level with crappy waltz jumps that never get any better.

I spent some time cruising the web for other adult skating blogs and found them very inspiring. I should figure out how to make links for them on my sidebar. By midday I was anxious to get back on the ice and just keep practicing. Furthermore I cleverly chalked up my overall terrible skating after the lesson to dull blades, which is not entirely impossible. I have skated at least 25 hours on this sharpening and I have heard that sharpening is recommended about every 20 hours. So I contrived to escape work early, and drove like a maniac to the skating store and get them done just before closing :) The blades look much better now and I hope they bring me a more pleasant skate tomorrow. Tomorrow is my 3-hour epic morning and I am looking forward to it now!

Rewiring for Loop Jumps

Today I was feeling a lot better but still not 100%. Fortunately I still had energy to skate. On Mondays I only have about 25 minutes to practice everything in my expanding portfolio before a private lesson and a group lesson. I slacked off a bit on stroking exercises although I did get through most of them, I didn't spend too much time on them. I practiced all my spins briefly, although the ice was a bit too chewed up to work on backspins very much. I found a less chewed up patch back behind the icing line to practice my sit-change-sit a little bit to keep the momentum going.

During my lesson I asked my coach what is on the first freestyle test. She rattled off a surprisingly long list of elements, most of which I have not practiced yet. Including a program! Yikes! But she thinks it's not out of the question to be able to start pulling a program together around Christmastime.

On that note we moved on to a new element, the loop jump. After watching my substandard version from a RFI 3-turn, she showed me the way she wants me to do them, from a long backward glide on both feet, one foot in front of the other. I have seen the jump done this way but I had never tried it, and it seems impossible. There is no swinging of a leg or toe pick to initiate the jump, it just springs out of nowhere. All the jumps I learned were basically tacked on to three-turns, so much that in my mind the three-turn IS part of the jump. I have a real mental block doing the jump this way. My coach is really trying to re-wire my brain! I managed to squeak out a couple of proto-loops while clinging to the boards but that was about it.

We also worked on the toe loop, which used to be an easy jump for me but now that there are all these new things I have to think about it is a real mess. In one attempt I even got so confused I fell down! I can't remember the last time I fell doing a toe loop. Sometimes I feel a bit like a deer caught in headlights when my coach fires all these tips at me, I just seize up.

The way I was originally taught to skate was mostly through a 'watch me' sort of instruction and a few basic cues. For example a toe loop was 'three-turn, pick, jump, land'. It didn't really get more technical than that. The key elements with each jump was which type of three-turn and whether it was a pick jump or an edge jump, that was about it. I never had a step-by-step breakdown on anything until I started working with this coach. Therefore, this style of learning has lead to a tendency to just skate on automatic pilot, and a poor sense of kinesthetic awareness. I am re-learning each element from scratch complete with microscopic details. It is difficult, but it should make me a better skater so I am trying to soak up all the new instructions.

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.