Sommo' Practice

After a long session of practice, Coachie gestured for me to come over to her. Little kids and their parents were filing in the rink for Learn to Skate.  She clearly did not want them to overhear her so she raised her hand over her mouth and looked at me conspiratorially.  Oooo, I think, this must be pretty good if she doesn’t want anyone to hear her. I bet it is some fabulous, juicy gossip! “Will you…,” she began, “ land your @*#% Loop jump on one *%$##@ foot??!!!”

Practice was pretty productive.  We’re working on making the Bronze Mohawk sequence more swirly, more like the dance steps it is based on. This straightforward step sequence seems so basic but it is not.  For instance, after the RI Mohawk you need to stay down in the knee, hold the LBI edge,  step onto  RB edge, do a smooth backward Mohawk, curve on a FRI edge with a highly bent knee, slide chasse the left foot, bring feet together, and then push out onto a different lobe to repeat on the left side. You have to be in complete control of your arms and core, an issue for me since I tend to drop my right arm on every-crappy-thing. My biggest problem is not the count of five, but rather the transition to the LI Mohawk. It takes all my concentration to remember all the little refined parts.

Although my right-sided power threes are probably the best I ever done them, I still STILL!, Scrape my toepick on the LBI edge as I push onto the right three turn. I am spending quite a lot of time trying to improve this; you have to hold your hips like you’re doing a “wrong way” (CW) spin entrance, but open up your torso to give yourself room for the push to the RO three. Yeah, I know it sounds so easy a baby could do it. Stupid baby.

Why do I want to test? Why, indeed, do I actually insist on testing? [insert  existential skating rant here]  Why do I think I have to skate perfectly?   Why can’t I just skate for fun, why do I think I have to be good? ? [insert another existential skating rant here]

I did have some fun with waltz-jump-Loop jump combos, even if the take- off for the second jump was overly toe-picky. I managed a centered scratch spin, that most certainly did not blur but was technically correct.

Another adult skater at my rink (one who can’t skate at all) told me that I looked “beautiful” when skating. Aw shucks. She’s blind, of course, but it was incredibly kind of her to say so.