Moving Up, Moving On

Today, the axel went into the program.

We have a local competition here in June, and I was going to skip it. I just did Adult Sectionals and Nationals not so long ago, and later this year my area has a big adult competition and is hosting Regionals, both of which I was planning on skating. This June competition seemed like a good one to skip. But I was talked into it.

Sunday, I passed my silver free skate test, and my local silver level skating friend begged me to compete. Frankly, I'm interested in seeing how we'll fare against each other. She moved up to silver last year after Nationals, before I'd passed my bronze test, so we've never competed against each other. Secondly, I knew that once time for the competition rolled around, I'd be sorry not to be out on the ice. But I've spent so much time on my program since December, I kind of wanted to give it a rest and work on some other stuff.

But I signed up, and last night I sort of grudgingly recut my music, since silver allows 2:10, where bronze can only be up to 1:50. I tried my best to do something that wouldn't completely uproot my current choreography. The easiest thing was to add music to the beginning, but that's where some of my favorite choreography is. Silver allows one more jump pass than bronze, so I knew that's what would be going in there. The cut sounded decent, so I brought it to the rink to let my coach hear it to see what she wanted to do with it.

She likes it. And she wants to put the axel in there right up front. And she found a way to put in some choreography that I really like around it. We're also changing up my spins a bit, if they'll fit. The camel-back sit, will become a camel-sit-back sit. And the sit will become a sit-pancake. It feels like we've breathed new life into my program. Suddenly there's new stuff to work on baked right into the program.

I did my first run-through, and as I went into the camel, I thought, "I'm not usually this tired here." It wasn't until I was done that I realized that I had done 20 seconds more skating at the beginning! (Well, not quite, I think I added like 17 seconds.) I still kind of see this competition as a throw-away, and luckily, my coaches do too. It's an opportunity to put some new stuff out there without too much pressure, and now I'm looking forward to it. I'm glad I signed up. I knew I would be.

Mid-Year Goal Update

Eva's last post on goals inspired me to post my own. I never wrote down any official goals for this year, so you'll just have to believe me when I tell you what I had in mind at the beginning of the year.

One of the reasons I didn't write down goals for this year is because beyond the following three things I knew I wanted, I wasn't sure what else I wanted to accomplish.

I wanted to have a clean skate at Nationals, or at least feel like I'd skated my best.
I would say that I accomplished this. Could my combo spin have gone better? Yes. But I skated everything else basically as well as I possibly could have. I also wanted to medal in the free skate and finish in the top half of the solo dance event. I wasn't sure if I could make it a goal, though, since those things don't depend completely on me. But I won both events, so I realized that goal, even though I never stated it.

I want to land my axel.
Well, I'm still working on this. I still think I'll get it this year, but my experience working on the axel so far is that you can't really make predictions about it. I did have a bout of hubris with this jump when I started it. I thought I would get it faster than average, because my coach thought I had a good concept of the jump and I have pretty good body awareness. But I'm definitely not setting any speed record on this jump, and that's okay.

I wanted to pass Gold moves and Bronze dances by the end of the club year (June 30).
Honestly, I was hoping to win my club's award for most tests passed again. It's kind of a silly goal, but I had it in the back of my mind anyway. So far, I have not gone for any of these tests, and while bronze dances are still somewhat likely this summer and I'll definitely do them this calendar year, gold moves will probably not happen. But I'm testing my silver FS next week, which was not even on the radar for me at the beginning of the year. Our awards banquet is next week, so those tests wouldn't count for the award anyway.

And those were my goals for this year. I'm still working on the axel, the gold moves, and the bronze dances, so I suppose they're still in effect. I'm pretty close to obsessed with the axel, so I feel like it might be healthy to make some other goals to work on too. I'm working on the skatingforums spin challenge, though a bit informally, as well as trying to get some more interesting spins going, in anticipation of moving up to gold some day. Which brings me to my long term goal: qualify for championship gold someday. This is not a goal for this year, nor for next calendar year, but maybe the year after that? (2016) I guess if that's my long term goal, since I'll need my axel and my gold moves and that competitive experience to get there, my current goals are on the right track.