Coffee Club Crossovers

I actually made it to coffee club today, and despite the fact I skated Wednesday and Thursday nights I was fine (although I didn't do anything particularly taxing). The ice was particularly nice today... there's something about good, fresh ice that is just a rush. It's hard to describe. On fresh ice you feel like you could glide about forever. Indeed, I had a pushoff today that I glided on my left foot for over 35 feet; and it wasn't that great a pushoff, even.

During the lesson Cecilia asked the 3 of us what we wanted to work on, and I said forward crossovers, so we did. We worked on doing a LFO edge, and just putting the right foot on the inside of the left foot and flexing it. Once we got that of course we had to put the right foot on the ice. I was able to do that somewhat okay, but then of course she wanted us to glide in that position for a bit and I just wanted to immediately pick up my left foot. Part of the trick is that you have to flex your crossing foot so that it's not tilted forward when it touches the ice -- otherwise your toe-pick will catch. So you need to flex your ankle so that it's parallel to the ice, then put it down. The other hard part was that you want to be on an inside edge when the crossing foot hits the ice, so you need to rotate your ankle a bit to make that happen. I'm having trouble with that.

After some time on that we went on to work on skating backward some more, which I certainly need to do. Once more into the backward 1/2 swizzles on a circle! They are improving, though. I really need to probably spend 15-20 minutes on them at every practice. It's just hard because the hockey circles tend to be in the traffic area so that only leaves the middle circle or doing it ad-hoc.

When I was leaving I was talking with Nicole and Cecilia a bit. Nicole was going to have her pre-bronze MITF test in a couple of weeks but they've pushed it back. She's disappointed but I'm sure it will work out fine in the long run. Maybe that will be me in a year.