Choreography: Day 1

Christopher cut my new Freeskate music so we were ready to officially begin choreography! Woot! Up until now, I have just been working on individual elements that are going into the program but I didn't have anything choreographic to practice. 

We only got through the first 20-30 seconds because learning choreography is so hard for me. Once I have it learned, it's easy peasy, but the process of watching him do a beautiful movement and then trying to replicate it myself causes me anxiety.

He gave me a really pretty starting pose and steps leading up to the first jump combo which will be the salchow-loop-toe loop and then about 5 seconds of pretty movements coming out of the jump combo. Although I've been working on this new jump combo, it's still pretty inconsistent and, now that I'm doing it at speed in the program, I'm struggling. I manage to land it well enough when I'm able to take my time with it but putting it in a program makes me feel rushed. I guess I'm just going to have to "get good", lol. 

Usually, when I'm learning choreography, I ask Christopher if I can take a video of him doing it because it helps to see what it's supposed to look like versus what I make of it. He said "no" this time (*gasp*)! He said I'm at the point where I'm capable of doing the choreography and I really should be taking videos of myself doing it and learning from that. He's right. So, he shot video of me doing the opening choreography and it looks roughly like it should (yay). I need to trust myself more. And this is one of the many reasons why I appreciate my coach - he lets me lean on crutches when I need to but when he knows I'm capable of doing it on my own, he pushes me out of my comfort zone to do it. Here is the link to the video. I botched the jump combo and couldn't get that third jump in but this is just a start. I have room to grow with this. Also, this is not my program music but I somehow skated the choreography in time to it anyway. Neat. 

In our last few minutes, we worked more on the layback spin. He wants me to start arching my back more instead of just looking up. That's pretty scary, but then all of skating is pretty scary, isn't it? You just move from one scary thing to the next scary thing. Sigh.