My Jumps, My Jumps, My Lovely Lady Jumps!

There were no other sessions available for me to go to at my rink (because of the goofy drop-in schedule) so I drove to APEX and skated at their Wednesday night public session again. It was nice! Only about 5 other skaters on the ice so I was able to get quite a bit done.

Movez - I haven't been focusing on moves too much with the competition coming up but I wanted to take advantage of all of the empty ice. I spent a lot of time on the Circle 8 and have come to a conclusion. Since my LFO circle is so big because of my wonky leg, can't I just make the the other circles bigger to match so it doesn't look so disproportionate? I tried it out and I am not having any problems making it around on the bigger pattern. I mean, it's not so huge that I will lose points. If anything, wouldn't they be more impressed that I can do it with a bigger pattern? Just a thought. I'll ask Christopher what he thinks. The good news is that I'm making it around every single time now without a foot down. So yay! Perimeter Power Stroking felt solid forward and backward so I didn't spend too much time on that. I moved on to Five Step Mohawks and ended up tripping myself on the last lobe. I got up, did the pattern again, and did fine. Silly feetz getting in the way. Harrumph. I skipped the Power 3-Turns and BX-BO edges.

Spinz - Lots of spinning! The attitude spin is getting better but it's still not where it needs to be. I'm going to have to dedicate a good portion of my practices to this one element. Everything else in the program is consistent but this...this has me worried. I got a few that had the required 3 revolutions. The trick is to center the spin first and then get into position (obviously) but I don't have a lot of time to get into and out of the spin in the program so there are some things I need to adjust. If I rush getting into the spin, there is no way it's going to be centered. Finally, I threw some back spins in there just to say I did them but they were unimpressive at best.

Jumpz - At my last practice my spins felt great and at this practice my jumps felt great. Why can't I just have both in one practice? I took advantage of feeling jumpy and worked on a bit of everything including waltz-loops and loop-loops. Mostly, though, I concentrated my efforts on program jumps. My waltz-falling leaf-half flip is coming along nicely. Since that sequence is in both programs I worked on this the most. For the Geisha free skate program, I worked on transitioning from the landing of that sequence into the attitude spin. Since it's so crucial that I get that part right so that my spin works, I wanted to make sure I spent some quality time on it.

Programz - I was able to run the compulsory moves in its entirety a number of times. This was pretty easy since it only uses half ice. However, I wasn't able to run the Geisha program from start to finish because it was still a public session and people kept getting in my path. But I did work on sizable sections. It's so much easier to run it during a freestyle session where I can wear the sash and have the right of way. Sigh.