Wednesday, September 4, 2019

How Mandi got her Groove Back

I haven't posted about the past couple practice sessions because they were unremarkable except for the fact that I'm skating better and not falling as much. I think the switch to dynamic stretching during my off-ice warm-ups was a good call! I had a lesson today (the first one since I hurt my hand) and it was actually a good lesson! I didn't feel like such a disappointment afterwards so that's nice! Progress!

Lessonz - We started by looking at my program jumps in isolation. Somehow in the last month or two, I started cheating my toe loops again, especially in combination. We worked on those a bit before running my Bronze Compulsory Moves routine back-to-back. The first run through went well but I was 6 seconds over the time limit of 1:30. He told me to do the whole thing again and speed things up a bit (I put the video below). I was able to shave a lot of time off of the whole thing and it came out to 1:25! Better! I have a tendency to rush the BI 3 turns so he reminded me to extend and hold those positions. Watching the video it really does look like I'm just rushing through it just to get it over with. The sit spin is still not low enough (at this point I'm just accepting that the hardware in my leg will prevent it from ever being more than a "squat spin") but at least it was centered and I got the end pivot done in such a way that I'm facing the judges at the end (I had my back to the judges at the end of the first run through...oops).

We ran my free skate program and that was okay too. There were no falls and I ended on time with the music. I struggled with the attitude spin at the end and turned it into a basic one-foot spin. Christopher worked with me on spins for a bit and reminded me to do them from a standstill down the blue (a torturous but effective exercise).

I think this was my first good lesson in a long time. I really hope I fixed the problem and the dynamic stretching does the trick. I have a week and a half until CSI so let's hope I can keep the ball rolling.

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