These past two weeks have been axel agony. For almost all of October, I seemed to be getting closer and closer, and then all of the sudden, I was moving backwards again. I tried and tried to think of each practice as a fresh start, an opportunity to get back what I knew of the axel and make progress, but it just wasn't working. It was hard not to get frustrated. Well, I did get frustrated. But I tried to diligently put frustration behind me and work at what was going wrong. But for two weeks, I made no progress. Suddenly, what had become a pretty stable take-off for me started falling apart and it was waxel city. I bailed on the take off a lot and sometimes just got it plain wrong. I did a lot of two footed once arounds.
Saturday morning, I got to the part of my practice in which I was practicing axel. I did some exercises, muscled through a few poor attempts, flubbed some take-offs, and then I went for one again. My toe-pick hit the ice and I went down on my butt. I felt dejected. I sat there grumpy, a little longer than I should have. I made eye contact with one of the only coaches on the ice. He isn't my coach, but he's on just about every session I skate on. Pretty sure he had seen the jump I said, "Was it even close?" I wasn't sure of how far around I'd been when my toe pick bounced off the ice. "No," he said unequivocally, "maybe half a turn short." I sighed and pulled myself to my feet. It wasn't what I had wanted to hear, but I appreciated his candor. Then he whispered to me, "I would hold the edge a little bit longer," and then he put a finger to his lips, as if to say it was our little secret--after all, he's not my coach. "The entry edge a little longer?" I asked to confirm. "Yes, a little longer," he confirmed and again held his finger to his lips. We then went our separate ways.
I was willing to try anything, so when I went for my next attempt, I waited on the entry edge. And there it was. Not a fully rotated, beautiful axel with lovely flow out, but the quarter turn cheated axel that I had been doing for the previous month. I tried it again and again, and I was still bailing on some, but when I reminded myself to wait that fraction of a second longer than I think I have to, the majority of the jump would come. It felt familiar; it felt good.
Today, I did enough of them to even be able to think about my position in the air and holding still and tight until the landing, which I think was what had done me in in the first place. I'm still in this tenuous back and forth place. When the take-off finally got consistent, I started focusing on getting that landing, and then I stopped getting the take-off right because I was no longer thinking about it, but it's not quite muscle memory yet. I'm so ready for all the pieces to come together. But why do I feel like the axel will always be the cause of some amount of agony?
