Breaking In The Skates

As usual, I practiced at the Monday night public session. It was not too crowded and the ice was in decent shape. I spent a reasonable amount of time working on my standard stuff -- two foot glide, swizzles, rocking horse, snowplow stop. I also spent some time working on the backward wiggle and backward swizzle. At one point I succeeded in doing several backward swizzles in a row -- I wasn't really thinking about it, and when I tried to think about it I couldn't do it. So I suspect my body knows what to do and I'm getting in the way.

I'm wondering about my left foot, though. First of all I noticed in my snowplow stop it seems I may really just be pushing out with the right foot and not really (or not as much) with the left. I tried to do a snowplow with just the right foot; no problem. Then I tried to do one with just the left foot, and I could not seem to get my left foot to slide at all. I don't know if this is because I actually have edges now, or if I've always had this problem and didn't realize it. I think it's new, though, because I really thought I was balanced on my stops before. Similarly, when working on my backward swizzle I'm still getting toepick-crunch with the left foot. And in a similar vein I noticed that to really get on the flat of the blade on my left foot I'm having to lean more than feels normal -- that is, if I feel like I'm balanced too far outward on my left foot, when I look down it looks like I'm on the flat (and the ice feels like I'm on the flat, too). I don't know if this is my skates or me (ankle pronation). I'm concerned about it.

I'm still breaking these skates in and I am relacing them frequently during my sessions. Today I actually laced them all the way up to the top, which felt okay. I had some pain in my arch on my right foot for a while, but it seems when I feel that it's because I'm not laced tight enough on the instep, so when I relaced it was better. It seems to be a consistent problem that I don't lace tightly enough on the right foot at first. I'd be concerned except that I have this problem on rollerblades too.

All in all I skated for about an hour and a half and had a pretty good time. I still am going pretty slowly though, but that's okay. I actually had a lot of fun working on the backward stuff. I also notice when I'm going forward and I stroke, stroke, and then glide, I tend to rock my weight backward when I get to the glide -- that is, after the second stroke my weight rocks backward on my skates and then I compensate and move it back forward. I'm not sure what that means.