Coffee Club

I went to coffee club today. Before skating though, I stopped off to pay for my next semester of group lessons. They gave us a 15% off coupon with our certificates on Wednesday, so instead of $108 it was merely $91.80. Since our lessons are on Wednesdays I asked about Christmas Eve and New Years Eve, and the woman said I could go on Saturday instead of those Wednesdays... so that's what I'll do. I noticed they had a handout in the office that listed all the private instructors available and their phone numbers. There are only 6 or so at our rink.

As I was coming in the door to the rink, Cecilia the instructor was also coming in. She paid me a compliment, saying "You must really love this sport!", to which I replied something like "I must, I keep coming back."

During coffee club I worked on a bunch of things, but mostly my backward left-foot glide and crossovers. As I do periodically I tried to see how far I could glide (one foot) on a push off. Between some increased effort and the nice ice, I set a personal best -- I was able to glide from one blue hockey line to the other, which according to the diagrams I've seen should be about 54 feet. Yea!

During the lesson there were 5 of us. We spent the first part working on swizzles both backward and forward, Cecilia emphasing power. She told me I need to really bend my knees more (how many times have I heard that? :-)) and really push. After that we worked a bit on an getting one foot in front of the other. She had us skate the width of the rink with just a push off and then gliding the rest of the way with one skate directly in front of the other. It's hard! It really requires you to bend your skating knee to get the other foot in front. She had us do it on each foot, and then backwards. Of course I can't quite do it backwards, but I did try. She then worked us on crossing over without picking up our feet -- I can't do that yet either, although I almost could when on my (strangely enough) right foot(!). I thought that was odd. For the last couple of minutes she had us try a one foot glide in an "attitude" position, which apparently is just having the free foot behind over the print and bent at the knee, and the free arm held over the head very artistically. I think I did that okay.

The other fun thing for today was that Nicole landed her first loop jump... so of course we made her do it again while we watched. I'm so proud of her! She's worked really hard.