Pushing On...

I had my 16th lesson tonight. I had a 6 p.m. meeting so I didn't get to the rink as early as I would have liked, to warm up and get comfortable. I had about a 4 minute warmup, and my right boot felt funny.

Tonight we worked on a wide variety of things... we looked at the my one-foot glide and my LFO edge; Glenn worked with me to get more lean, more edge on it. Next we worked briefly reviewing stroking. We also spent a goodly amount of time looking at my backward swizzles, and Glenn also introduced the backward 1/2 swizzle pumps on a circle that Lisa had shown me Saturday. After a little bit of time on that Glenn had me go into a backward glide and then work on picking up one foot, i.e. a backward one-foot glide. I could only pick my foot up for the briefest of times, but he said it was a start. We didn't look at the turn or crossover stuff today. The other new thing Glenn introduced me to was a T-stop. He said since my left foot glide is pretty solid it was time to start working on it, so we worked on it a bit.

Toward the end of the lesson I asked him about testing next week, since it's the end of the semester. Not surprisingly he said he wasn't really interested/concerned with it, and said "I'm testing you every week!" which is pretty much true. He said we could test if I wanted to and I didn't really say anything. He said he would be teaching me next semester as far as he knew (he was pretty certain). I'm grateful for that.

I noticed a little bit of sliding on my right boot, and I asked Glenn if I needed to get my blades sharpened. He had a look at my right blade and said maybe in a couple of weeks it would be time. I'm skating about 5-6 hours a week, and I've had these boots/blades for about 9 weeks, so that's probably 50-60 hours of skating on them. I'm not sure how that compares with other folks.

After my lesson I stayed 'til the end of the session (9:30!), in part because almost everyone left at 9 and I couldn't resist the chance to skate with only one other person on the ice. On the other hand I was pretty beat by then, and they never resurfaced the ice tonight so it was pretty disgusting by then. During the session I worked a fair amount on my turn, a little on the crossover (step-over at this point), and I experimented with the T-stop. I actually had a good T-stop once. The key is (as Glenn warned me) to keep it on the outside edge -- if you catch the inside edge you're history. I can do it about 2/3 of the time, but I usually wasn't holding it to a complete stop. I didn't think I would be able to get the T position correctly but it was okay, actually. Finally, during the last part of the session when I had a lot of time to myself, I worked on my backward swizzles since normally it's too crowded to do much with them. They are not nearly as good as the forward ones, but they are coming. The biggest challenge is to bring my feet together in between as I do for the forward ones. I am tending to lean forward a little when I'm going backward, which makes my balance a little tenuous. I'm not getting the power that I do on the forward ones, either.

The disappointment for the evening was that I couldn't get my right foot glide on the flat tonight. I don't know if it was tiredness or my right boot feeling a little funky (I was too lazy to relace) but I just couldn't get it. Still I was pleased with the lesson and pleased with my progress. Glenn mentioned to me that after my lesson last week, a couple of women had stopped him and mentioned that I had come a long way. That made me really happy. It's a little thing but it's nice.