Surviving!

Today was my first time back on the ice in nearly two weeks and I survived! On Tuesday morning I had my little hand surgery and last night I took the bandages off to assess things and see if my hand is strong enough to be able to tie my skates. Everything looked okay and I think as long as I keep band aids on (especially over the stitches) I'll have enough mobility to grip, pull, and tie my laces. After I was re-bandaged, I grabbed my skate bag and put my skates on. I wasn't able to pull my laces as tightly as I usually do but I was able to tie them tight enough that my ankle felt stable in the boot so I made the executive decision to officially get back on the ice.

Off Ice Warm-upz - While I was off the ice, I had a lot of time to think about things and one of the things I discovered is that the way I'm stretching off ice is having a detrimental effect on my skating and may just be the source of all of my falls lately. I did some research and fitness authorities emphatically say that static stretching actually reduces performance (here's just one of the articles I found but there are more out there)! So I started thinking about this more and realized that my poor performance on the ice directly coincided with the start of my whole running and stretching routine that I've been doing! The running is fine but then I should be doing a series of dynamic stretches and save the static stretches for after my practice. So, that's what I did today and I actually had a really good practice despite my hand being sore. I ran two laps, walked a bit to cool down, did some dynamic stretching, and then some floor jumps. I don't know if it was because I've been off the ice for two weeks and had some time to rest or if it was because of this new warm-up routine but I skated well today and didn't have any falls! I'm going to keep this experiment going to see if it sticks. The more you know!

Practicez - Once I was properly warmed up off the ice, I laced up my skates (carefully) and got on the ice to do my on ice warm-up of laps, edges, circle 8, and backward 3 turns. Hell, even my backward 3 turns felt good today! Nice. After warming up and jumping for a bit, I moved right on to working on my compulsory moves routine while spending extra time on the section with the backwards 3 turns and the new jump combo (loop-toe loop). Things look okay here but I need to speed the whole routine up a bit. I feel like I'm maybe over the 1:30 time limit. Next, I worked on sections of my free skate program but was struggling a lot with the salchow-loop combo so I reverted back to the toe loop-loop combo. I'll talk to Christopher about keeping the original jump combo in there. I just feel like with only two weeks left until CSI, it's not a good time to fussing with new jump combos. On the plus side, my salchows are looking a smidge better. During our last lesson Christopher pointed out that the reason why my salchows are so spinny is because I'm rushing the 3 turn entry. If I hold the entry of the 3 turn longer that forces everything to slow down.

It felt really good to be back on the ice. I'm still nervous about the competition coming up because I really don't feel ready for it but I'm just going to keep working on things. Maybe I'll surprise myself :)