Figure Skating is my Drug of Choice

Is figure skating addictive?

If you are an adult figure skater, you probably keep a journal or some other record of your progress.  Figure skaters are obsessed with improvement, no matter how miniscule. The kids, of course, learn skills faster and will advance rapidly, especially if they practice. Adults measure their progress in years, as in “last year at this time I couldn’t do x, y, and z but now…”

Actually, there are plenty of adults who either stall at a certain level, or seem to endlessly work on the same five skills for all perpetuity. Since improvement is relative, what’s most important that you continue to grow and modify your goals as the years pass by.

Complacency annoys me, whether it involves skating or not. Lots of people are happy doing what they’re doing and that is no crime, but I figure there is so much to do and learn why would you want to hit stasis?

Of course, by “progress” I don’t mean rocketing up the skill ladder. Lots of skaters will announce that they’ve “got” a jump or an element and let the matter rest. Truthfully, just because you can do a certain jump or whatever, doesn’t mean there isn’t room for improvement. For instance, I “got” a salchow jump quite some time ago. But I still work hard on making it better, improving speed of entry, more control on the three, controlling the free leg better and so on.

Funny, but as you try to improve something, that particular skill may disappear for a while. If you “have”a scratch spin but decide to make it faster, more centered, with more revolutions, you may briefly lose the ability to do the spin at all as you tweak.

This situation will make you hate yourself and wonder why you are pouring all your extra money into a sport for which you obviously have no aptitude ( why am I even bothering with the second person here? You know I’m talking about myself, my favorite subject).

 But then you “get” it and the joy is a powerful high. Like other addicts, you kill yourself trying to get back that glorious feeling again and again. Like drugs, that never works. So you work on improving once more and so the cycle continues.

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.