"Rinking" in the New Year

It's the fifth day of the new year, and I've already skated three times at two rinks in two different states and had two lessons! I'd say I've hit the ground running.

New Year's Day
I started with a public session on New Year's Day. Ten minutes into the two hour session, the skate guard had the crowd start going clockwise and never changed it back again. That put a pretty serious limit on being able to practice many jumps. I took advantage of the opportunity to work on the CW side of the 8 step mohawk pattern. I also spun a fair bit and left the rink feeling very, very sick to my stomach. I've been struggling with dizziness or motion sickness more recently and it finally clicked that it might be because I'm actually getting 7 or 8 rotations in every time I attempt a spin. That's a lot more cumulative rotating then it used to be.

Skating on the Road
A few weeks ago when I was making arrangements for the business trip I went on this week, I decided to bring my skates. A rink nearby (well, 25 minutes) to the client site has a Thursday night public I went to once before. After the new year's day skate, however, I didn't feel a real compulsion to go skate at another winter break public session. But I had space in my luggage, so I brought my skates. The night of, I still didn't really want to skate, but decided to make use of my skates since I brought them.

I don't know why I bothered. It got crowded quickly, I forgot to put my gloves on before I closed up the rented locker, I visited the world's slowest snack bar because I forgot to bring a bottle of water. I couldn't practice much more than a couple of spins but I was getting dizzy and didn't want to get to feeling as sick as I did the other day. When they resurfaced the ice mid-session, I bailed and drove back to the hotel. That'll probably be the last time I take my skates when I go to visit that location.

Incomplete Sharpening
Dance coach sharpened my skates first thing this morning. He happened to see me two foot a loop during my freestyle lesson. "Oops! I didn't include that jump. Blame the sharpener!" "Argh! I can't do anything on these blades!" I called back, in mock irritation. "What was that all about?" Coach asked when I skated back to her, and I explained. Coach joined in on the faux complaining: "Hey, I think you forgot to include the lutz, too!" "Well, she asked for axels and double sals!"  Yah, right!

Speaking of Jumps...
They didn't go so well in my lesson. I kept getting freaked out on my loop, due to weird crowd patterns. I two footed a lot of them.  Flips are coming along okay, but I've noticed that my picking leg comes up really high and I sort of tip forward. I can overcome it and still jump on the flip, but I think it's the same problem that's affecting my lutz, and I can't get all the pieces of the jump together after that. Coach tells me to tuck my hips under. I think I also may need more knee bend.

Coach says we'll need combinations for the competition I want to do, so we tried waltz-toe. My toe loop is a disaster. I don't know why. It tends to be better in combination than by itself, but even that seemed to be toe-waltzing today. "Let's try something else," Coach suggests, "how about flip-toe or flip-loop?" The idea freaked me out a little, since I haven't been doing a full flip that long, but I went out to try it. It wasn't until I landed the flip that I realized I hadn't decided which combination I was going to try. I at least had the presence of mind to notice I landed the flip with my foot in front so on the next try, I decided to go for the flip-loop. I landed it twice! I need to work on the flow out of it and Coach says adding some speed to it will help with that.

My First Competition Cometh
The details for the March competition were published this week. Pre-bronze freeskate is limited to a maximum of 1:40 seconds. Coach and I picked a piece of music several months ago and have been playing with it, but I had a hard enough time cutting it down below 2 minutes. There's no way I'm going to get it to 1:40, so it's back to the drawing board. And now we're 9 weeks from the competition with no music and no program. This is going to be my very first program and my very first competition. It's too early for me to be getting nervous, right?