Put a loop on it

Welcome to Thursday, the day where you are too tired from the work week to do anything meaningful during your pre-lesson practice session.

Practice - I started with the usual warm-up then quickly went into spins. My spins today were just so mediocre. I've never been the best spinner in the world but when I'm having an off day they are barely recognizable as spins. So I moved on to jumps. My proper toe loops are gone. I just have cheated ones now. I did some by the boards to refresh my memory but I guess they are taking the day off. I moved on to the waltz jump sequence and it's better but not fantastic. At least the jumps in this sequence are looking more intentional. I dabbled in some salchows. Those are fine. I did some loops. Those are also fine.

Lesson - We started with loop jumps and I did a nice one for him and, as a result, he wanted to attach loop jumps to everything! We started with a waltz-loop combo. I've done these before so no problem. He would like to see more cross on the loop jump part as I tend to uncross my free leg in between jumps. We then moved on to a salchow-loop combo. I just could not get the free leg right on the landing of the salchow to make the loop happen. We did a few of these and, defeated, I told him I would work on it. It's really just a brain thing. I can do both jumps but retraining my brain to think of the salchow landing differently may take more than few minutes. Then he asked me to do a loop-loop combo. Much easier. The first one I did was unimpressive at best but the second one was a lot better. Again, he pointed out that I uncross just before the second jump. I think I just need some time practicing landing all of these jumps with my free leg crossed in front. It won't happen overnight. Out of all of these combos, the loop-loop was the most promising. We talked about spins for a bit and I expressed my doubts about the sit spin happening in time for the competition. I suggested a camel spin in its place. He said "sure...but what about an ATTITUDE SPIN!" I mean, okay. Seems easy enough. It's just a fancy one-foot spin. How hard can it be? It was hard. Something else to work on now :)

Competition Prep - I told him that I was going to wait until the very last minute to enter myself into the competition because I really don't feel confident about anything right now. I'm worried about embarrassing myself. He noted that it's the experience of the competition that counts, not whether I place well. Getting in front of an audience is a unique and rewarding experience regardless of how well I do. It will help with nerves and it will give me the opportunity to skate against other adults. I think the gist of what he was saying is to enter anyway. It will be good for me.