Moves, Dances, and Musings

I didn't get a chance to write about last week's lesson (oops). Anyway, here's what we worked on this week. 

Lesson - Christopher caught me working on (and struggling with) the Forward Double 3 Turns. I lamented about how I was able to pass Silver Moves with good backward 3 turns but now I am struggling with the same turns at Gold. He suggested going back to working them in the Silver Moves pattern to get the feel for them again. I'll try it. But like, it's not like I don't practice these every freaking day. Why are they getting worse and not better? It's so frustrating. Moving on, we looked a bit at Brackets. My FI brackets are lovely. No problems there. My FO brackets are turning but I struggle with momentum after the turn. Backward brackets are non-existent. Even doing them at the boards is a struggle. These truly feel impossible to me. The backward brackets are the one thing on the Gold Moves test that I just can't do. Like, at all. Ugh. After that torture, we took a look at my Backward Circle 8. These have seen some improvement. I'm getting around almost every time but I could still use stronger pushes and some better placement of my feet in the center when I push. To round out the remainder of our time, I requested we look at dances. I feel pretty solid with my Hickory Hoedown so we spent some time working on the Ten Fox. This is one of those weird dances that actually feels better partnered instead of skating it solo. His main criticisms were to not block him (I do that all the time mostly because of anxiety) and to have neater feet on the end pattern. I feel like if we practice this a bit more, I can test this in the Summer. 

So yeah, I'm back to working on Gold Moves, my Silver Free Skate (which I'll keep for another season since I only got to compete with it twice) and choosing music for a new Free Dance. I asked Christoper to pick the theme - Fun and Flirty or Soft and Dreamy. He chose Fun and Flirty to contrast more with my Free Skate which is already soft and dreamy. I have dresses ready for whatever he chose and I'm really excited that he chose Fun and Flirty because my dress for that is amazing! I was able to snag one of the 25 coveted spots that Brad Griffies offered earlier this year so I ordered a dance dress that has a black skirt and a hot pink crop top. Once I bling it up it's going to look hot! Excited for something new!