Where the hell did those come from?!

Today was a weird day. Morning practice went really well and then, during my lesson with Christopher later in the day, skills just magically appeared out of nowhere. I'm not complaining. It's all good. But damn, where the hell were those skills on all of the other days I practice?

Morning Practice - Today was the first time I ran my program since Casper and I wasn't expecting much considering it's been a little over two weeks. Well, it was a clean program! Neat! I also ran my compulsory moves a couple of times and those were good. I ran my Free Dance program a bunch of times too (what little I have so far, anyway). Everything felt really nice today. Spins were great as well.

Afternoon Lesson - Christopher wanted to put me in the harness for Axels today so we started with backspins. I gave him a look like "are you ready for this trash?" Except, they weren't trash! My backspins have FOR YEARS been flamingo'd and I've never really been able to cross the free leg over. Except today? Every.single.one had the free leg crossed over with really nice exits!!! Dang! I'll take it! Christopher still had corrections though. He would like for me to cross at the ankles instead of my free leg being so open and crossed over the knee. So, he puts me in the harness and has me do some waltz jumps and waltz to backspins as prep and then he set up his iPad to record some Axels. I landed TWO of them! On one foot! What?! Where the hell did those come from?! I was so excited to see the footage however, when he went to go check, it hadn't recorded after all. NOOOO! Aghghg! So we tried some more and I couldn't land any! How frustrating! I also ran my program and it was good except for a fall on my loop (of all things). So he had me do the loop again while I was still out of breath and then had me do the lutz-toe again while I was even more out of breath. It was a great lesson and I landed a couple of Axels! Woot!

The 24 Program Challenge (2/24) - Oh hey, another program challenge! I have 24 practices between now and my next competition in April and these challenges are really helping me keep myself accountable so I'm going to keep doing them. I ran my program once in the morning and again during my lesson. That's two down!

Twosday

Today is 2/22/22 and I skated twice! Double the ice, twice as nice!

Morning Practice - This morning was spent mostly on getting the opening steps to my new Free Dance under control. Literally it's just the first 4 bars of music and I'm struggling. Christopher's choreography is always so beautiful and flowy and sometimes I'm just...not. Today is one of those days. But I was still able to get some work done. 

Afternoon Lesson - First off, I warned Christopher that I was struggling with the opening steps. He had me demonstrate and, despite the practice, it looked as garbage as I said it would. In particular, it was a simple backward two-foot glide (one foot in front of the other) that was throwing me off. I asked if maybe he could just change it but he was determined to have me do it regardless. It's not that I couldn't do the move, it's that I overthought it to the point that my brain broke around it. He simply told me to add a half pump before it and even though that didn't change the move really, it fixed my brain. Hooray! I can do the thing now and we moved on to the rest of the choreography! I think we have the first 30-40 seconds done now and it's really quite nice. He took video and it looks really good. I still need to polish it and then get the timing better with the music but it's a good start. We also took a look at my dance spin (catch foot camel) and he got a good one on video. Minus the initial anxiety-induced panic over a silly two-foot glide, it was a good lesson.

Competition Debrief Lesson

Christopher seemed pleased about how I did in Casper but wanted to get to work right away on trying to fix some of my problem areas - camel spins and lutz. 

Camels - Even though I've made progress with not swinging my left arm into the spin, it still needs some work. He gave me one of the long dogs to hold with both arms extended in front as I enter the spin and man, that's difficult! But, it's a good way to train my brain into really keeping that left arm out in front during the entry edge. We did some without the long dog to focus on my free leg position. Currently, it is slightly bent on the entry edge so he wanted me to do some while making a conscious effort into keeping that leg as straight as possible. Old habits are hard to break so this was hard for me. I'll keep working on it that way, though. 

Lutz - He gave me the long dog again and had me hold both arms out extended in front of me for the whole jump in the hopes that it would get me to stop pre-rotating on the entry. Again, difficult but I'll keep working on it. He also had me do some exercises where I do two half lutzes and then do a full lutz. My pick in for the half jumps is great but when I add that extra half rotation for the full jump, the pick in goes to hell. So he would like for me to do several passes of the half jumps to full jumps to trick my brain into doing the proper pick in. 

Free Dance - It's been a couple of weeks since we worked on choreography for my new free dance and I've been so consumed with preparing for Casper that I haven't really been working on it. We went over the intro choreography again and I promised I would dedicate some time to this since I don't have another competition until April. 

So yeah, my work is never done. There is always something to fix or work towards.

2022 Casper Invitational

Well, I made it back from Casper! Here's what happened: 

Morning Practice Ice - I had a scheduled practice session at 7:20am and the first thing I noticed when I stepped onto the ice was how damn hard it was. This is probably the hardest ice I've ever skated on! I felt like I was skating on top of the ice instead of down into it. It was unsettling and I had a hard time securing an entry into my camel spins because of that. However, it was a good practice and all of the rest of my skills seemed to be there so I wasn't panicking.

Adult Silver Compulsory Moves - Alright, here we go! My first time competing an event at the Silver level! It was myself and two other ladies and I was first up. I felt relaxed and reminded myself to smile and have fun with it. I think that worked because it was a great skate. The only snafu was that I couldn't hold my camel but I recovered it with a scratch spin. I had nice speed on everything and was pleased with how smooth my footwork sequence felt. I think I got extra points for doing arms overhead on my loop too. For my first time out in Silver, I feel pretty good about how I did. I got GOLD with all first place ordinals from the judges! Here's the video. 

Adult Bronze Free Skate - There was some drama with this. We were all supposed to get on the ice for this event at 11:40am. We all did off ice warm ups, laced up, and got ready to go to the staging area when we were told that they moved our event to 1:00pm. We were a bit miffed at this. Like, they could have told us before we got ready. I just thought it was kind of rude. So, I was ready to go out there and kick ass, but then had to wait another hour and a half. When it did come time for our event, the ice was freshly zam'd and I was ready to go. I was the third skater out of four to go on and I was ready! I got to my starting pose and it seemed like forever for my music to start but, once it did and I nailed my first jump combo, I knew it was going to be a good skate! I hit all of my musical cues and I even got the camel-backspin to happen right on cue! Everything went as well as it could and when I finished my second spin and hit my end pose, I was so happy I just laughed. This was the first time I've had fun skating this program. I got GOLD with all first place ordinals from the judges! Here's the video. 

Parting Thoughts - There were some challenges with this competition (super hard ice and getting yo-yo'd around with the schedule) but I didn't let them get to me. I went out there and skated from the heart. I didn't punk out on the new spin Christopher gave me either. I'm proud that I was able to throw together a Silver Compulsory Moves routine a week and a half before the competition and skate it well enough to get first. I had a couple of bumbles in both my free skate and in my compulsory moves but I recovered from them and continued with a great skate! Heck yeah!

Weird Day

 Despite getting a new Apex schedule that lists a 6:45am session for Wednesdays, I got to the rink only to find out that it starts at 7:45am like it has in the past. So, I was ready to go but had to wait an hour for the session to start. Then, I almost got on the ice with my guards on! Luckily it was just one foot and I looked down right as I made contact so I was able to save myself from a really bad fall. THEN! I had a stupid fall on my warm up doing my usual backward power strokes (hello, click of death). Didn't hurt anything other than my pride. So yeah, not a good start to my session this morning. 

Compulsory Moves - I wish I could say things got better but they did not. I couldn't get my feet under me today. It felt like I was skating just slightly outside of myself. Frustrating. 

The 12 Program Challenge (15/12) - The only good thing to happen today was that I ran my Free Skate in the last 5 minutes of the session (risky, given all that has transpired). It was a good run through and I was even able to do the Camel to backspin. I left the ice shortly after that because that felt like a victory and I didn't want to push it.

Practice tomorrow morning. It will be my final practice before I leave for Casper on Friday. 💀

Much Skating Such Wow

 Today was one of those days where I skated in the morning for practice, went home to have coffee and change, then off to Pilates, then home to change for my lesson. I'm pooped!

Morning Practice - Mostly I worked on individual elements for my program and then ran the Compulsory Moves routine until I died. Compulsory Moves is looking really nice, though. I took a video of the whole thing and it is under the time limit. Also, I caught my best camel spin to date on video (I don't feel like posting it so you'll just have to believe me). Four revs in camel position and then 10 revs in a scratch spin. That's 14 freaking revs total! My spins are getting so much better! If I do that at the competition that will be HUGE.

The 12 Program Challenge (14/12) - I ran my program twice this morning and then one time during my lesson for Christopher so I have not only met the challenge, I exceeded it! And I have more runs to do this week! *confetti cannons*

Lesson - We spent half of the lesson looking at the Compulsory Moves routine. He seems pleased with it. He would like for me to skate the transitions quicker so that the whole thing flows more. Also, spend more time on the landings! I'm still under time so there is no need to cheapen it by cutting the landings short. My camel spins were okay but they weren't as good as they were this morning. He then proceeded to dig up a video of me from a year and a half ago when I was only able to do 1.5 revs just to show me how much progress I've made. First of all, I was hella surprised that he has a whole library of videos of his skaters to pull from in moments like this and second of all, I have come a long way! Neat! It was refreshing to see that because we sometimes forget about long term progress that has been made and only think about the day-to-day progress which is sometimes negligible. Cool. He then asked to see my Free Skate program and it was okay. He reminded me to look up more on the choreographic step sequence and he wants to add a backspin to my camel to make it a combo. So I ran the second half of the program with these new adjustments and it wasn't a disaster. So I'll work on adding the backspin. I have a few days to get it right. No pressure. 

FitBit - So my 2 year old Inspire HR FitBit is dying. RIP faithful friend. BUT! Now is a great time to get a new one! My workplace is giving us $100 towards a fitness thing (gym membership, exercise equipment, trackers, etc) and on top of that, FitBit is having a big sale! So, I was able to get a FitBit Sense for a REALLY good price. It should be here on Wednesday and I'm so excited to  have more ways to track my health and activity! Wahoo!

Getting it Together

I'm practicing this morning instead of Wednesday because we are supposed to have a big snow storm on Wednesday and I don't want to miss a session when I'm this close to competition. 

The 12 Program Challenge (11/12) - OMG...it was clean! Yassss! Hello confidence boost!

Silver Compulsory Moves - I started out stumbling and realized I was stumbling over the same thing - the RBO 3 turn. I'm going from a LFO3 to a RBO3 and I'm just struggling with getting on the right edge for the backward turn. So, I made the executive decision to take it out (I'll apologize to Christopher on Monday). In its place, I put in a mohawk-crossover move and that made all the difference! As soon as I did that, I was able to run the whole thing several times (CLEANLY!) and stay within the time limit! Hello, more confidence!

Today was great! I got everything sorted out and I'm ready to compete. It doesn't feel daunting anymore and I think I might be able to do this. Also, my camel spins were AMAZING today! I was able to really get down in my knee on the entry and pop up for the spin (I'm not usually able to do this!). This resulted in some speedy and centered camels! Heck yeah!

Casper, I'm coming for you!