Welcome to the Zoo

 The blue rink is shut down for maintenance and so twice the amount of skaters were on the red rink today during my lesson. It was a dangerous mix of little kids who lack situational awareness, ice dancers, adult skaters, and Sullivan skaters. Even with Christopher spotting me, I bailed on a bunch of patterns because I really don't trust anyone. I always fear a little kid will just appear out of nowhere and we both go down. I am really not in the mood for another injury so I skated with an over abundance of caution (with a dusting of fear). 

Lesson - First, I begged Christopher to not make me run the program with all of these people on the ice. Super dangerous! He agreed and so we spent our time looking at field moves and that one bit of choreography that I'm still getting hung up on. We started with the Power Pulls and I think he could see the small improvements because when I asked him if it was passing, he said yes! I still have about a month and a half before the test to make even more improvements but at least it's headed in the right direction. Next up, we worked on the bad side outside mohawk on one of the hockey circles. I made some slight improvement when he had me lean back more facing out of the circle. I just have to remember to practice it this way. We moved on to the Cross Strokes and he noticed some slight improvement with the backward strokes so these are getting better too. Finally, 3 turns. He noticed that I'm looking into the direction of the turn (which is good) but I'm only looking with my eyes. I really need to look with my shoulders, neck, head...everything. It was a good observation and when I made the adjustment, the turns felt easier. 

We spent almost half of the lesson working on the choreography that is troubling me. There is a push under that I just cannot coordinate with my arms. Like, the arms by themselves are spot on but once I do it with the footwork, it gets stupid. I just have to keep doing it, I guess. Of all of the difficult things I'm doing in this program, it's a push under with arms that is tripping me up. Super frustrating.