Thursday, July 26, 2018

Giving my coach some attitude!

Lesson day today and I've been pretty anxious about it because, although I have been running the program at home, I have not run the thing in its entirety on the ice. I did my typical warm-up routine and ran through my repertoire of jumps before spinning a bit. Mostly, I ran sections of my program and worked on making the transitions smoother. I'm not sure how successful I was.

Lesson: We started off by looking at the LFO on the Circle 8. Same problem as always - the circle is just too big. I'm not putting a foot down at all now but the circle size is definitely a problem. It's twice as big as the other circles so it's very noticeably bigger. We worked a bit on reducing the size but to no avail. I asked him about a blade adjustment and he agreed that that might help but I want to keep working on it for a bit first. I definitely don't want to go making blade adjustments right before a competition either. That sounds like a recipe for disaster. I'll wait until after :)

Program: So, on to the program. He asked if I've been working on it and I said that I've been working on sections without the music. He says that's fine but I really need to be running it with the music at least once per session. Cool. I'll do that. I just feel awkward running my program without my coach present. I guess I'll have to get over that, huh? So, I put on the sash, got into position, and the music starts. I got all of the jumps landed and everything was placed relatively where it was supposed to be but I finished just short of the music and the final spin was rushed. When I skated back to him, he asked why I did a two-foot spin where the attitude spin was supposed to be. I told him I was worried about the attitude spin not being ready in time (in all honesty, I haven't been practicing it as much as I should). He was adamant about that spin being an attitude spin so we worked on that a bit until it was time to run the program again. Everything's a mess. Ugh. We ran the program again. This time, I did five crossovers before the loop jump instead of the two I was supposed to do (because I was dizzy form the attitude spin attempt and didn't want to do a loop jump under the influence, so to speak). As a result, I was really behind the music. So, yeah, the second run through was more awful than the first.

I have a lot to work on. Like, A LOT! I think I might have to add another day during the week to practice for the next month or so until the competition. He's not going to budge on the attitude spin. He really wants it in there and I can't blame him. My spins are limited already by my physical handicaps so I don't have many interesting spin options. It's important to move beyond the boring one-foot and two-foot spins and learn something new. I get it. I'm just really nervous that I only have 7 weeks until the competition and this spin is nowhere near where it should be.

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