The Journey to Bronze

The day after passing my tests, I had my scheduled lesson with Christopher. We did more talking than skating because we needed to talk about what happened. We needed to debrief. Basically, yeah, there were nerves. We discussed entering some competitions so I can get the feel of skating under pressure. Skating for a judge was very new to me and I wasn't prepared for how I was going to react both physically and mentally. I talked to him about the new Adult Competition Series that the USFSA just implemented this year and he told me to look into it and get back to him with whether or not that's a thing I want to do. He also suggested taking part in the 2018 Colorado Championships since that takes place at our rink in August and it will allow me to skate on home turf, so to speak. Our plan is to beef up the Geisha program by adding more jumps to make it appropriate for competition and keep it for the season rather than scraping it and starting on a Bronze program. I'm thinking if I turn my waltz jump into a combo and add a toe loop somewhere near the end where I have that long one-foot glide through center ice I'll meet the "four jump elements" competition requirement since I already have a half flip and salchow in there as well.

After debriefing, we started right away on Bronze MIF. I really wanted him to look at my five step mohawk since I basically taught it to myself. He confirmed I was doing it correctly so yay. We also spent some time working on the power three turns to make sure I had something else to work on in addition to the mohawks.

Over this past week, I have been working a lot on all of the Bronze MIF elements. So far, the thing that is giving me the most grief is the Circle 8. I can get around on 3 out of the 4 circles but the LFO portion is really unstable. Again with the left leg! I'm not sure if this a "broken leg recovery" issue or an upper body alignment issue. I'll need work on it for sure. If I can just get that Circle 8 under control, I might be able to test in December. Secretly, I've been working on Bronze MIF for a while so it's not like I'm starting these from scratch, it's just that now I'm working on them officially with my coach. Ultimately, he decides when I'm ready to test. But I do know this, I am NEVER going to test both MIF and Free Skate on the same day. That's just too much stress and anxiety. Never again!