Moves in the field

The Saturday morning freestyle session was marginally less crowded than last time. I feel like I got some stuff accomplished. C forgot her skates and so coached from the boards today, and while I know it was uncomfortable for her, I think in some ways it helped me. She had to do even more verbalization of what I was doing wrong than usual, and that always helps me more than watching demonstrations.

I'm still struggling with leaning to the right enough on counter-clockwise back crossovers. I can do clockwise ones well, but according to C, watching me do CCW is like watching someone wearing their shoes on the wrong feet--there's something subtly off about them. Every time I think I've figured out what's causing my problem, it turns out to be something else. Very frustrating.

C got me to start pushing more on my consecutive edges and also doing this thing where I actually own the "control" aspect of them and don't flail around move my arms and free leg to their new positions as kind of continuous wave motion, but rather in one discrete moment at the top of each lobe. I really like what these things do to my edges.

My spirals were actually decent this time even without any warmup. I bought a wobble board a couple weeks ago, and I think doing squats and one-foot balances and practicing spiral positions on it has really helped my on-ice spirals. (For the safety conscious, I do this positioned so that if I ever faceplant, it will be into my nice, soft bed.)

While I was practicing, fellow adult skater R and I got to talking about spins, and she mentioned that forward scratch spins take place on the outside edge of the blade.

[Gru voice] Liiiightbulb. [/Gru voice]

Because a forward spin is an outside three turn that keeps turning, and a backspin thus must be an inside three that keeps going, and...yes, I see how this is supposed to work. Not that I can get it to work, yet, but I think this will prove fruitful over the next three weeks.

There was a baby pair team running their programs on this session, and I gotta say, watching a death spiral* from a few feet away is really, really cool, even when both members of the team are falling out of it after one revolution more often than not. They had some nice lifts, too; I've never seen the shoulder-height two-handed ones the baby pairs start out with, so that was nifty.

After the session ended, I spent two hours getting home because a horrific accident closed the interstate for six miles and flooded all the surface streets. I suppose only Nashvillians will understand the nuance here, but let me put it this way: I came home partially via I-24. From Franklin.

(Which is not to say the people involved in that accident, and family thereof, didn't have a much, much worse day than I did, of course...)

* While searching for a suitable video clip, I found this no-hand death spiral. O. M. G.