Makeup Lesson

This morning I had a makeup lesson, since I missed my 7/2 lesson due to being in Dallas. This was my 15th lesson, and the first time I'd had a lesson on Saturday morning.

The Saturday instructor is Lisa. She seemed surprised to see me (they don't tell the instructors in advance, you just show up and the office gives you a slip to give the instructor), especially since apparently the other person in the class had had a bad fall and stopped coming. Anyway, after a brief introduction we got started and I showed her where I'm at. She looked at my turns and my LF edges and asked me to skate a LFO around a (large) circle, which I did. Then we looked at my backward and forward swizzles a bit, and she had me try backward 1/2 swizzle pumps on a circle. I tried these out a bit and she gave me some pointers. She told me these are preparation for back crossovers, which makes sense. She also looked at where I'm at with my forward crossover and encouraged me to continue practicing that. Finally, she asked me if there was anything in particular I'd like to learn and I asked about the backward snowplow, so we looked at that and I tried a few. It's not too bad. I'd need to be skating backwards a bit faster to really get good practice on that.

At the end of the lesson she encouraged me to continue working on my LF edges, the backward 1/2 swizzle pumps on a circle, and the backward snowplow stop. I'm kind of amused because I've now done about half the Basic 3 curriculum, and half the Basic 4. It's kind of weird.

After the lesson I had an hour to kill before public session so I had some lunch at Little Anthony's at the rink, and did some reading. Finally the session started, and it filled up fast and became quite a zoo. I did get a fair amount of work in on most everything. I worked on my backward swizzle and the backward snowplow stop, did the back 1/2 swizzle pumps on a circle (and forward, too), worked on stroking, my LF edges, the 2-foot turn and even some time on the forward crossovers (although I didn't do any of them moving forward, just in place). I also spent a fair amount of time working on my right foot glide, with no apparent success. About the only thing I didn't really try was my clockwise 2-foot turn.

One of the nice events was bumping into a woman, Lisa, that I'd met elsewhere. I knew she was a skater but I'd never seen her at the rink -- at least I didn't realize I had. It turns out that I had, I just hadn't recognized her because when I'd seen her before she was blonde (-er) and wasn't wearing glasses. Anyway, we had a nice chat about skating. I stayed 'til about 3 and then had to get home -- I was pretty beat anyway.