Goals for 2018

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goals

Last year was kind of a big question mark for me, skating-wise, so I can’t say I had defined goals or even plans — I was just glad to resume skating again after being out with an injury, and relieved when my skills started to come back. I also went coachless for the better part of the year, and skipped competing and programs altogether, so it was only fairly recently that I started to look forward with concrete goals again.

For 2018, I would like to:

• Compete my silver free skate at Adult Sectionals. I have no idea how I stack up against the field so my goal is purely personal: skate everything clean and get credit for every element.
• Go to Nationals. I’ve wanted to go every year but something always came up (or I decided against it at the last minute because of the expense), but I have my eye on going this year. Fingers crossed I can manage the scheduling!
• Practice the axel. I’m not aiming to land the axel, but I know that there’s zero shot of that ever happening if I don’t even attempt to practice it! I have padding and guards and I feel like I’m ready to move on from prep drills, but I have a hard time mustering the courage to actually practice it.
• That said, I also need to be careful about axel practice, because I was recently attempting them and tweaked something in my bad hip (that I had surgery on). It’s hopefully a minor thing, but it scared me into remembering that I’d rather skate forever without an axel than to reinjure myself, require more surgery, and have to quit skating! I haven’t figured out where the line between challenging myself and being protective/careful is, because I’m not ready to give up on axel hopes yet. But I will if it comes to it.
• Test Intermediate moves in the field. I’m not in a rush to pass tests, but Intermediate has several overlaps with Gold, which I passed, so only 3 new moves to learn. I think getting this sometime this year is a reasonable aim.
• Double twizzles in all directions, triple twizzles on the easier ones. I’m getting more comfortable with the forward (1-and-a-half) twizzles on the Intermediate test, but my coach challenged me to try for triple twizzles, because “Once you’ve done triples, the test will be a breeze.”
• Get 3 revolutions in a flying back camel spin. I’m making good progress on the back camel, but currently I’m at the 1-revolution-and-fall-out phase of the flying version.
• Level up the spins. My coach was going over all the spin possibilities for my Silver program, and it’s kind of mind-boggling all the combinations and variations that give you levels. I feel like a Level 1 would be within reach; Level 2 is a stretch goal.

Back in the saddle: lessons, programs, tests

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goals, programs

I’ve started working with a new coach, finally! After floating around on my own for a while, basically since my surgery last summer, I started looking earnestly into finding a coach with my eye on getting a new program and competing at Sectionals/Nationals next year. I’ve been working with my new coach about a month, and after discussing my goals and looking at where I am, we decided to shoot for Silver FS, which means putting together a new program and also testing. It suddenly feels like I went from relaxed to strapped for time, with all that’s required to get ready for the season!

The last time I competed was at Sectionals in 2016, about a year and a half ago, and my then-coach had suggested afterward that I stay at Bronze for the next season. I figured she knew better than I did and agreed with her opinion, but then I got injured and had to sit out the next season anyway. When I resumed skating, I focused a lot on edges and moves and feel like my overall skating improved a fair amount, but I wasn’t sure what my new coach would think. I put the question to her and after we went through my jump and spin repertoire, she thought I was ready to try for Silver, so we got right to working on a new program.

If I want to compete at Sectionals in March, I’ll have to pass my Silver FS test by January at the latest. It’s already nearly November, so this doesn’t give me a whole lot of time! It seems possible, but will require a lot of work, so I’m getting into my training mindset to learn things as quickly as possible.

Goals for Silver Freeskate are:

• Increased flow overall and speed throughout. (I was happy with my Bronze FS at Sectionals, but did see how it lacked flow and speed.)
• A diverse collection of transitions other than 3-turns and crossovers. Would like to throw in some harder turns like rockers/counters and twizzles.
• Performance quality! I don’t think I’ve been able to *perform* my programs in the past because I was so fixated on hitting the elements, but I’d really love to actually interpret music and engage with the program this time around.
• Jump layout will probably be: Lutz, flip, loop, likely a flip combo, and then another combo of some sort (Lutz?)
• We’re still figuring out what spins will work best. Which is to say, nothing stands out right now as particularly strong, so we’ll try a bunch of spins and see what is working. Possibilities are camel-sit-back sit, back camel-back sit, or sit spin with a couple variations in position.

Goals for the upcoming year

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goals

I’m terrible at seeing through goals — not because I give up on them, but because I tend to plain forget about them! — but in the name of fresh starts and new years, here goes.

• Testing: Pass either my silver freeskate OR my gold moves. I’d love to do both, of course, but that may be overly ambitious, so I’d like to focus on one for now. I’m leaning toward the silver free, but it depends on how soon I can be back to pre-surgery form.
• Competition: I really, really wanted to compete in Sectionals this spring, because it’s in my neck of the woods and very likely will move out of town next year. But there doesn’t seem to be enough time to get a new program ready by March (or even Adult Nationals in April), so I’ve set my sights on the adult international competition in Vancouver. It’s technically an international trip, but since I’m on the West Coast, this may be an easier trip than making it to Nationals on the East Coast, and it would give me through summer to get back in shape.
• Get all my single jumps back. I’ve started jumping recently and can land some, but they’re very dinky and awkward, so I’d like to get these back to where they were last year (and better, of course). I’m not sure about resuming work on the axel; I’d love to do it, but I’m still not sure how strong my hip is.
• Spins: Get them all back, of course. Also, get layback consistent with better free leg position and back arch. Get more than 2 revs in my back camel. Work on flying camel.
• Incorporate new footwork into my programs, such as split jump, hydroblade, (at least a double) twizzle.
• Flexibility: I’ve lost a ton of flexibility all over, and some of it may never come back (sniffle at my dreams of a beautiful outside spreadeagle or my ultimate dreams of an Ina Bauer into an axel). But I’m sure some can be worked on gradually, and I want to at least get back mohawks and inside spreadeagles, maybe some baby Ina Bauers, and spirals.
• Get into overall shape (to where I can do 2 run-throughs back to back), lose 15 pounds and regain the muscles that disappeared.

Looking back at Skating Year 3

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goals

I’m a few months late to my skating anniversary, but I figured it’s better late than never. I know that later on I’ll wish I’d posted about Year 3, even though right now I don’t feel like I have much to say specifically about it.

My third skating anniversary was in February, when I wasn’t doing a whole lot of skating. In fact, until this month I hadn’t done much skating at all this year, given my big move in March. I use a skating app to track my ice time for sharpening purposes (SkaterBase is great, and I recommend upgrading from the free app to the paid version, because it stores more than 3 months of data), and I only skated three times in April, and three times in May. Yikes! I’m amazed I didn’t lose more skills, at that rate!

Because I was busier with work during my third year of skating, I don’t have as many milestones or shiny new skills that I can say I learned over the course of that year specifically. In fact I started listing things and then realized they fell under Year 2, not 3.

I did pass my bronze freestyle test (on the second try), and put together a new program that I want to use for future bronze-level competitions. I added some spins to the practice repertoire, like back camel and back sit, although I don’t “have” either spin yet. My coach also started me on a layback spin, which at the moment is more like a look-up spin. I worked on getting my sit spin into a “true” sit position, and steadily worked at flip and lutz jumps. Flip became a lot more consistent — not pretty, but landed a lot of the time — while lutz was still a work in progress.

Moves: I learned the silver moves patterns and slowly worked away at them, and also learned some of the gold patterns, just to get a jump on practicing brackets, double threes, and power circles. I had hoped to test silver moves last year, which didn’t happen.

Mostly, it was a year of building skills, adding power and speed and skating with more command. I do feel like I was able to do that, although those are goals that don’t have an endpoint; I’ll probably want to keep increasing power and flow forever!

And so, since I’ve finally started to settle into my new skating routine, I feel like setting concrete goals is a manageable feat.

Goals for the upcoming year:

• Pass Silver Moves test. According to my new coach, she thinks I can do this sooner rather than later. She said maybe July or August, though I told her I’d like to have the skills above passing level because I know I’ll get nervous and I still sometimes step out of the back 3-turns. Still, testing before/by autumn seems worth shooting for.
• Combo spin: Get it consistent in program — camel-sit-backspin, or better yet, camel-sit-back sit. My camel is so erratic that I can sometimes pull off a nice combo if I hit it, or miss the entire spin if I don’t nail the entry perfectly.
• Back camel. I LOVE the feeling of this spin when I get it going! The forward camel doesn’t give me that thrill, but the back camel just feels so good on the blade.
• Layback. I get so dizzy! But I’d love to put this in a program.
• Axel. My goal isn’t to land an axel, just to start working on the jump itself, instead of only doing prep exercises.
• Dramatic program. I’ve gotten fairly comfortable with my bronze freestyle program, but want to keep it since I never got to perform/compete it. But I’d like to add a dramatic program, so that if (when!) I go to Sectionals/Nationals, I can participate in more than one event.
• Compete. Technically Sectionals/Nationals falls under my next year’s goals, but I’ll be working toward that all this year. I’m starting my fund now!

Revising goals

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goals

Sometimes I have a hard time taking hobbies lightly. I have a competitive nature and I’m a perfectionist, so once I get something in my head I tend to want to do it all-out. And if it’s not something I want to pursue seriously, I’ll usually drop it entirely. Life’s too short to do things you’re not passionate about, right?

Ever since I started skating, it’s been my primary hobby, and I’ve been at it pretty consistently for the past almost-three years. I’m not a competitive skater (in the sense of actually competing regularly), and my level of commitment is somewhere south of “getting up at 5am to skate before work,” but whenever I can go skating, I want to go skating. I almost never feel, “I could go skating today, but I don’t feel like it.”

So this year has been disappointing for me, because I haven’t skated as much as I would like to, even though I love it as much as ever. But skating is time-consuming (and really hard to schedule into a “regular” adult working schedule) and also really expensive, and sometimes I feel that pinch of guilt (or more than a pinch) at spending so much money on it. Thus far I’ve been able to afford it, but it’s never money spent easily; I make conscious sacrifices elsewhere to be able to afford my skating.

Maybe more pressing than the money issue is time, though, since I’ve been busier with work and have had to skip a lot of my regular practice sessions, to the point where I’m not quite sure what my regular practice sessions are anymore. I feel like I’ve gone through the five stages of grief about this — angry that it has to be this way, bargaining to try to compromise and find time, and on through (grudging, sad) acceptance.

What it comes down to, I think, is accepting that skating isn’t the most important thing in my life. I’ve always known this, but life is encroaching more and more and I’m having to prioritize more now. I hate that I have to cut back, but I’m also a grown-up with other responsibilities (sadly!). I can’t always have everything I want, the way I want it…

And by extension, that means that my specific skating-related goals have to be adjusted. When I first started skating and progressing quickly, I wanted to pass tests fast-fast-fast and compete and move up a level every year. But the past six months have made me realize that if I want to skate forever, I should be okay with slow-and-steady progress, and not worried about hitting certain benchmarks by certain times. I had set Adult Nationals as a goal for 2015 since I finally qualify, but I have work-related things that make it hard to go. So if I can’t make it this year, I’ll shoot for 2016 — and if I’m not silver at that point, well it won’t be the worst thing to still be at bronze then. Right now I’m just happy to be able to keep skating.