Madness and Mayhem

 I was really looking forward to my lesson today but the rink was packed! There were so many skaters on my session that my anxiety levels went sky high. I couldn't focus on anything other than trying not to get run over. It's one thing if I hurt myself but I'll be damned if I let a child with poor situational awareness break my bones for me. Anyway, I did what I could and then told Christopher to go easy on me today due to the madness and mayhem. Sadly, this meant no additional choreography for my Free Skate but we were still able to work on some stuff. 

Gold Moves - We started with Forward Double 3 Turns. While these are looking a smidge better (or at least they feel that way), I'm still off on the timing of things. I'm always turning the second turn too early. He also pointed out that I'm (once again) not looking in the direction of my turn on the backwards 3s. I'm making it unnecessarily harder. Moving on, we looked at the Backward Circle 8 which is still a struggle. Doing this on rough ice on a busy session was not delightful but I tried anyway. My biggest issue, of course, is weak pushes. I'm okay on the edges but it's hard to maintain an edge (or circle shape) when you are going at a snail's pace. Sigh. 

Jumps - I proposed to Christopher my idea of opening the Free Skate with a Loop jump and then moving the combo elsewhere. He was cool with it (yay!) but he wanted to see the combo. I did one that was pretty mediocre. They typically have no speed so he wanted to see another one with more speed throughout. This is when I lost the Euler completely. Like, I just.could.not. Super embarrassing. After several failed attempts we moved on to some Flips and Lutzs. He gave me an alternate entry into the Lutz (mohawk crossover) and that's tricky but puts me on the right edge going into the jump. I'll work on it. Seems fun. 

Dances - Clearly, I wasn't able to do any pattern dances in their entirety but he had me skate the end patterns for all three Bronze dances making sure to bring my feet as close together as I can on the 3 turns and have soft knees throughout. 

Spins - We finished up the lesson with a look at spins. I'm really struggling with getting more rotations on the camel and my sit could be lower. Ugh. 

So yeah. It was a mess of a lesson. I was a mess, the ice was a mess, and there were just too many freaking people on the ice to get any meaningful work done. Oh well, there's always next week.