One year of skating

Tags

basic skills, freestyle skating, group lessons, jumps, performing, private lessons, programs, skating club, spins, testing

My one-year skating anniversary came and went a couple weeks ago and I’ve had this draft hanging out uncompleted for a bit longer than that, but I just hadn’t gotten around to posting it. Since it IS the first year, though, I figure it still deserves its post.

Here’s a rough outline of my first year of skating:

• February 12, 2012: First day on the ice. I felt shaky and my feet hurt, but I was determined to stick with it and improve. Bought skates and went to the rink faithfully for the rest of the month during public sessions, just figuring out how to stroke, swizzle, and one-foot glide.
• March 2012. Started taking group Learn To Skate class at about the same time that I started with my first private lesson. I intended to start with LTS and then transition to private, but got impatient waiting for classes to start. Worked on crossovers, 3-turns, mohawks, edges, and beginning waltz jumps.
• April 2012. Got comfortable with waltz, started learning salchow and toe loop.
• May 2012. LTS ended with me at Adult 3-4 level, though I decided not to continue with group lessons.
• June 2012. Landed salchow. Now to stop toe-waltzing.
• July 2012. Started working on loop. Upright spins starting to come together, sit spins suck, started camel spin.
• August 2012. Began learning backspin, though averaging zero revolutions. Loop still terrifying, learned flip and lutz entries (not jumping yet). 5-step and 8-step mohawk patterns, bronze stroking patterns, more basic spin work (spins suck).
• September 2012. Worked on turning 1-foot upright into scratch spin, lots of focused practices on dratted loop, worked on flip and lutz. No big breakthroughs, just lots of practice.
• October 2012. Landed first loop! (Sadly it did not stay consistent, and remained hit or miss for a long time afterward.) Started videoing (some) practices, which was eye-opening.
• November 2012. A busy month! Joined skating club, decided (at Coach A’s prodding) to skate in holiday show, which left 6-7 weeks to get a program together. Worked almost exclusively on program, and started doubling lesson time. Also bought new skates, more for the blades than for the boots. Coronation Aces immediately improved spins and took them from drudgery to being fun to practice. Lots and lots of skating this month. Started skating on freestyle sessions for the first time. Bought very first skating costume.
• December 2012. With program getting more comfortable, resumed working on other skills during lessons – flip, loop, lutz, twizzles, attitude spin. First time in jump harness. Performed in holiday show, to my terror and relief.
• January 2013. Program and holidays over, back to normal lessons. Lots of loop and flip practice, with a few more tries in the harness. Loop is landed most of the time now, but legs won’t cross properly. Backward 3-turns, bronze moves patterns. Improved scratch and sit spins, fussy camel. Getting 1-2 revs on backspin.
• February 2013. Turned attention to Pre-bronze Moves test, which is in March. Polished elements, got comfortable with test patterns. Picked music for second program. Landed flip!

Dress rehearsal

Tags

costumes, figure skating, performing, programs

So I’ve been pretty nervous about this upcoming holiday ice show, and while I wouldn’t say I was quite stressed about it, I would say preoccupied is apt. This show has taken over my life in the past week, and compounded with friends coming to visit from out of town (the week after the show), the holidays, and work projects nearing deadlines, all in all I’ve felt frazzled and overextended.

I’ve been telling myself that perspective is good, to remember that skating is just a fun hobby in my life — there are no real consequences to being bad at it! I do have a competitive nature so it’s hard to accept being poor at something I try so hard at, but let’s look at this glass-half-full and figure I’m building character. With skating you just can’t rush progress, so you really do have to accept where you are with skills and limitations, or… quit skating? Otherwise you’ll just be miserable.

Anyway. I’ve been doing program runthroughs in all my practice sessions, most of the time while listening to the music on my tiny clip-on mp3 player that I got for working out. I made a playlist that’s exclusively my program music, in three cuts: a full cut, a cut that starts a third of the way through, and another that only plays the last half. I find it easier than trying to fast-forward or just waiting for cues. It’s been really helpful to listen to it as I skate (usually with one earbud in), because when I would visualize my program without the music, it was difficult to gauge tempo and speed. With the song playing, even if I wasn’t doing the routine, it got me in the mindset of the right rhythm.

But by the time this week rolled around, I was kinda bored of it all, actually. Not sick of the music or the program itself — it’s still fun and there’s lots to work on — but bored with my practices. I was doing the same thing over and over, working on the same problems and trouble spots. I was tweaking, but not learning.

On Thursday we were supposed to have a full dress rehearsal to mimic everything about the day of the show: In my costume, I’d skate at my Usual Rink to warm up, then let my muscles grow cold as I drove over to Show Rink, where I would warm up for ten minutes only using the end zone (where the curtain would be up during the show). Then I’d start my lesson with a runthrough.

But last-minute things cropped up and we ended up going to Usual Rink for the lesson. Only, a huge group of schoolkids was there and the ice was terrible and there were so many of them (60 to 80?). They were teenagers, too, who are so much harder to skate with/around than younger children — they get wilder and louder and more reckless. Thankfully the group left as we were starting the lesson, but the surface was so choppy that I could literally not see any ice — there was a layer of snow over everything. They were supposed do an ice cut, but I think the zamboni was on the fritz. Sadface. I could do most of my elements, but spins just weren’t working — I couldn’t hit a camel to save my life and my regular upright spin was hit or miss. Coach A said that if I could do my program on this ice, I could do it for the show, easy. Problem is, my spins are really finicky these days and I had to adjust in order to spin on that ice, and I don’t think it’s ideal to change technique on a fussy element a few days before performance day. Eek.

It was a good experience in the sense that I had to deal with the unexpected and roll with less-than-ideal conditions, plus I had to go out wearing my costume amongst a sea of regular folks in jeans and hoodies and just get over it. I think with embarrassment at a certain point you choose whether you feel it or not. I had to choose not to be embarrassed about being a 33-year-old grown woman in a sparkly ice skating dress doing a program in front of bystanders with my limited skills. (More on the costume in a future post.) And it was strange, but after I chose not to care about it, I sorta didn’t care about it.

It reminds you that so much about ice skating is about mental strength, not pure skill. And hey, if you can’t quite find the mental fortitude to make it through a performance without being hit by nerves, perhaps you’ll find the mental fortitude to shove that memory out of your mind.