Keeping my head above water

Lesson today! I specifically asked to work on twizzles because, during my last few practices, it really felt like I was doing a 1 1/2 rotation back spin rather than a bonafide twizzle. When I look at the tracings it looks like a traveling 3-turn so I think that's right? Anyway, my overall sense is that it's wonky so better to have Christopher take a look, right?

Lessonz - Per my request, we started with twizzles. He noticed a few things with what I was doing. It appears as though I rise up on my toe pick on that final rotation which slows things down so I really need to find that spot on the blade and stay there throughout the whole move. He also fixed my arms and told me to stop looking down. My arms should be like I'm holding a large beach ball and I should be looking ahead. With these corrections in place, I was able to do a couple that felt better. This is just something that I'm going to have to dedicate some time to. He gave me an exercise where I do twizzles down the length of the ice increasing the number of rotations by 1/2 each time I start a new twizzle. Yikes! Lots of work to do. After twizzling for a bit, we moved on to looking at the final part of the program and polishing that up a bit before running the whole program.

Programz - The good news is that I completed the whole run-through without a fall and I ended on time with the music. The bad news is that it was sloppy as all hell. I think I was so focused on keeping up with the music that I wasn't using the whole surface of the ice. As a result, I made things smaller without even thinking about it. He told me he wants to see more coverage and to make the elements bigger. But he did note that I am indeed skating with more speed so there's that. Personally, I felt like I was just trying to keep my head above water. I was very toe heavy and I'm sure that slowed me down a bit too. But, you know, considering that I wasn't able to keep up at all when I ran it the last time, I think progress has been made. I'm sure that it will clean itself up the more I run through it.

Dressz - I ordered over 900 Swarovski crystals (just over 6 gross) in varying sizes and while that is very exciting, I don't think future Mandi will have the patience required to glue each one on individually. I see a lot of expletives in my future.