"Why figure skating?" and "Aren't you too old?" are two questions most adult figure skaters hear on a regular basis. When most people think about figure skating, they have visions of teens and early twenty-somethings skating competitively at Nationals and at the Olympics. They very rarely picture a middle-aged adult wearing skating skirts (or pants) and learning jumps and spins. So, what is adult figure skating and why would anyone want to do this when there is no chance of making it to the Olympics?
For me, I have very fond memories of skating as a child. About once a month, my childhood bestie and I would go to the ice rink and skate around to 90s music and flirt with boys. While I wasn't doing anything fancier than skating the perimeter without holding on to the walls, I thought I looked pretty good out there. But I always admired the figure skaters who dominated the center of the rink (to me, the "center of the rink" was sacred space that you just didn't enter unless you had white skates and could spin and jump). I wanted to be one of them!!!
I never got to take lessons as a kid. We just didn't have the money and time for that sort of thing. Besides, I was already in private music lessons and my goal was to get a music scholarship to college (which I did!). As an adult, I never really considered skating lessons. I didn't think that was a thing. One fateful day in 2004, when I was living in Texas and walking around the Houston Galleria Mall, I stumbled upon their ice rink and saw some adults skating around. I now know that what I saw then was a "coffee club" session reserved exclusively for adults. I was blown away! They looked like they were having so much fun and some of them were pretty darn good! I went online and signed myself up for lessons right away! I mean, what? You can skate and drink coffee?! Count me in!
I enrolled in an adults only class and before I knew it, I was spinning, jumping, and looking darn good on the ice. I loved that my rink was in a mall. I didn't mind an audience and I hoped that I could inspire an adult to pick up the sport just as I was inspired to sign up for lessons. Within months, I outgrew the adult lessons. I got a private coach, switched rinks, and started preparing to test! My progress was slowed when I got a new job in Colorado and had to move. Being new to Colorado, I enrolled in group lessons while I researched coaches. Since I was too advanced for the adult classes, I enrolled with the kids (awkward!) in the Freeskate 1-6 track but only made it to Freeskate 4 before I quit to focus on school.
I'm back now with a new eagerness to learn, test, and maybe even compete. Yes, adults can do all of the same things in figure skating as the kiddos do! While we will never go to the Olympics, we can still test our way through the adult or standard track tests, we can still compete at the national or international levels, and best of all, we can INSPIRE! Adult figure skaters are not doing this for the glory, we are doing this because it's FUN! We aren't doing this to fulfill our parents' unrealized dreams, we are doing this for ourselves! Instead of the pressure put on most younger figure skaters to land their axel by a certain age or they are considered a failure, adults consider the smallest advancements as success and will celebrate even the tiniest of victories!
Plus, I'm not going to lie, the skating skirts and tights make me feel pretty fancy :)
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