So much skating, and yet so little time.
The further you progress with skating, the more time it takes to maintain your current skills while adding new ones. I want to test gold moves and bronze dances by next summer. I'm planning to go to Adult Nationals in April and I'm working on landing an axel and suddenly all the many hours I spend skating a week just don't seem like enough. Especially with that axel.
I started full on working on my axel about two months ago and it has consumed a lot of skating time. In fact, all my lessons with one of my freestyle coaches have been dedicated to the jump. I'm starting to get it to a point now where I don't need the harness so axel can be part of the lesson instead of consuming the full lesson time with her. I haven't given any of my coaches a blog name yet, but let's call this one Maxine.
Maxine happened to enter the rink on our lesson day while I was running through back double threes and that ended up dictating that we would have a moves lesson. As dedicated as I am to the axel, it was nice to have a change. She was happy with my second run-through of the back double threes and she also thought my back 8 has gotten better. Then we started on brackets, which I'd only touched on briefly once with a previous coach.
Oh my. I want to like brackets, I really do. But they are scary. Maxine says brackets are like a clock. There's something for your hands, head and free foot to do at every hour marking on the lobe. Now keep in mind that between forward, backward, inside and outside brackets and 5 or so "hour markings" on each lobe that depend on which turn you're doing, there are A LOT of positions to remember. I didn't get them all right away. I took a good fall on a back outside bracket and after my lesson, another coach I chit-chat with asked me if I thought I was going to die on the brackets. I laughed knowing that my back outside bracket terror was written all over my face.
But there's hope. I tried them again today and they seemed somewhat improved already. I may be able to like brackets after all.
And since I mentioned my axel is making progress, here's a video of some of my latest attempts. It's still not fully rotated, but I have hope that it will get there some day if I can ever learn to hold a good air position.
Those back outside brackets are killer. I have taken many falls on them and starting wearing silicone knee pads because of them (I even wore them during my test). I can't wait to see how your gold moves are coming along. Your axel is improving a lot. I know you will land a fully rotated one soon!
ReplyDeleteI've known people who have started wearing padding when they were working on brackets and people who started when they were working on axels. I might need to look into it :)
DeleteAh, yes, the brackets. I remember the phase you are talking about well. For me, the front outside brackets were actually harder than the back outsides, though I've fallen on both, and those are the non-negotiable 'you aren't going anywhere but down' kind of falls. A couple of days before my gold moves test in June (which I got a re-try on) I started doing terribly on those front outside brackets, maybe because my coach was trying to get me to do them faster and maybe just out of nerves. I had a couple of falls then, and this was after working on the gold moves for 2 1/2 years. I'm sure my coach was nervous I would fall on them during the test. I didn't, but I did not pass the brackets. I've continued to work really hard on them and just last week my coach told me they are the best element of my gold moves. I hope that proves true on my test when I'm ready to take it again.
ReplyDeleteFunny how that works. When I first considered taking my silver moves test, I was most worried about passing the power pulls. By the time I took the test, I got my highest scores on those!
DeleteThat is funny indeed! My brackets were my worst move (by far) when I first started working on Gold moves. Since they were so terrible at the time, I worked the hardest on them. When I took my test, they were my BEST move, and I actually got bonus points on them. Go figure!
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