Heaven!

I went to the public session tonight. It was a rainy, stormy night in Tucson, due to remnants of Hurricane Marty. The result was not merely an uncrowded session, but pure heaven -- I had the entire rink to myself for the entire session!

Wow! I spent the whole two hours there, of course, and worked through just about everything (except skipping, once more, those darn forward crossovers). Especially, I spent well over half the time skating backward, both backward swizzles around the rink, and backward 1/2 swizzle pumps on the big middle circle. I also spent a good deal of time working on my backward 1-foot glide against the board. The technique I'm using is to do a backward 1/2 swizzle pump in a straight line backward, then when my feet are together after a stroke, pick up the free foot in front of the skating foot. I made some good progress with this, and a couple of times at least I was able to stay on the backward glide for 3 or so seconds. In doing this I also determined that part of my problem is that when I'm skating backward I'm tending to have my weight very far forward, which becomes a problem when I try to glide because then my skates really want to turn! I could especially feel this on the back 1/2 swizzle pumps on a circle, and I spent some time while doing them on trying to balance my weight on the inside foot better, more evenly front-to-back. I think I made some progress.

All in all it was just a really fun session. I was reminded of my July 3rd session when I was visiting Dallas and had the rink there to myself. It's interesting to compare where I'm at in the 11 weeks since then. I am so much more confident on the ice now. I have a lot more power and speed. I can glide on either foot, do a turn, a T-stop, and a forward slalom. All my skating is generally light years from where it was then. I've come a long way.