Lesson time!

Today was my first lesson with Christopher since I injured myself back in September. Yay for guidance!

We started out by discussing the new skates. I told him that there is a lot of pressure from the boot on my right inside ankle so he suggested that I get it punched out. I then told him that I think the left blade needs to be adjusted slightly since I'm having a difficult time getting on my left outside edge. Since I have a temp mount, it shouldn't be a problem. He had me do some one foot glides for him and, sure enough, I veer to the inside on that foot. Overall, though, I told him that the skates were a good choice and they should start to feel better the more I skate in them.

Spinz - After discussing the blades, he wanted to see how I'm spinning in them. One-foot spins look okay (he actually said they look a lot smoother now!) so he wants me to start crossing my leg over for some scratch spins. We moved on to some back spins (ugh) and those are still wonky. It's not the skates, it's me. But! I had a bit of an "ah ha" moment today while we were working on them! He had me just do a backward glide in the backspin position and I discovered that my upper body is turning away from the direction of the spin! So, in other words, my bottom half is turning in one direction while my upper half is going the opposite way. No wonder my backspins are trash! So, he tasked me with just working on the backwards glides in the back spin position focusing on keeping my upper body in alignment. I really hope this fixes things.

Movez - Obviously, I'm not going to Sectionals in March because of being off the ice for so long and trying to learn how to skate all over again with new equipment so I told him that I would like to just focus on getting skills back for the next couple of months. Mostly, I just want to work on Moves for now and then when my skates are broken in and I'm feeling more confident, I would like to start a new program for competition next fall. He agrees with the plan so we started with cross strokes. I made some progress with these today! He wants me to stay away from crossing the free leg over and instead glide it across on the ice. This helps with that underpush as well. w00t! Next, we tackled some backward 3 turns (the outside ones). I'm pretty much coming to a stop once I make the turn so we worked on having me keep the free leg crossed after the turn and that seemed to help. I've been neglecting the BO 3 turns in favor of the insides because of compulsories but now since I don't have to worry about competing anytime soon, I can make more time to focus on these again. We briefly talked spirals before the lesson ended. Basically, he wants me to work on getting five lobes down the length of the rink.

I have quite a bit to work on for next week but I've got my fire back! I think the time I've spent off the ice forced me to just regroup and refocus. It's silly that it took an injury to get me to do this but I'm happy that I have a better mindset now!