"Straight you back!"

Today I had a work trip up to Phoenix, and I managed to arrange to take my lunch hour (well, hour and a half) at Polar Ice in Chandler, in time to make the 1:30 public session. Since I'd never skated there I was looking forward to new ice.

It was a really nice experience. Since it was the middle of the day, I was sharing a rink with only 3 other people -- two hockey skaters and a young Asian male figure skater. I spent more time working on my backward swizzles again -- still getting that boots-touching thing to happen. I can do it but I have to have warmed up a bit, and gotten over my fear. It's coming. I also spent some time on the turn but had miserable success, so I left it and worked on my glides and stroking. I can finally say that my right foot glide is pretty much there. It's still not as solid as the left foot, but it was reliably there, both the flat and the outside edge, even. Finally!

The ice at Polar was pretty nice -- it was similar to the back rink (Rink 2) at Gateway -- hard and cold. It was quite cold, actually -- enough to make me a little uncomfortable. Since I had my usual skating gear on I can say that it's definitely colder than Gateway. While the facility is pretty new and laid out very nicely for the most part, it's rather annoying in that there's very little space around the rink itself. At Gateway there are a full set of bleachers facing the entire south side of Rink 1, and bleachers at the west end of Rink 2. As far as I can see Polar has no bleachers on either rink and it's a bit claustrophobic there. I also had a moment to compare the public session times at Polar and Gateway -- it appears that Polar still has morning times during school, however, they have no evening times at all! Eeep! So if I lived there I'd be hard put to get much skating in. On the plus side, I saw that they have lots of early morning freestyle times, starting at 5:30 a.m. or some such.

For the last 20 minutes or so of the session the hockey skaters had left and it was just myself and the young figure skater. After watching me a bit working on backward swizzles or some such, he came up to me to give me some advice. His English is a bit broken (I think he's Vietnamese, or perhaps Filipino) but his skating is excellent. He reminded me, "straight you back!" -- and he gave me an example both of what I was doing, and of skating with good posture. He also said "chin up!" and "don't look at ice!" It was a very helpful and timely reminder. I'm really glad he spoke up because I need to be reminded of such things. I thanked him and he gave me some other advice and asked me some questions -- could I do crossovers? No? Slalom? No? Finally he went back to practicing spins and jumps, leaving me with a valuable reminder and a good example.