A Falling Down Night

Tonight's lesson was pretty good. It was myself, Ashley and Desiree (Luz was, again, absent). I had talked to my classmates prior to class and gotten their agreement that we should ask to work on backward skating; so when Glenn came over at the start of the lesson and asked what we wanted to work on I said "backward skating!" and they agreed.

We started out by looking at a backward stroke. Glenn had us do something sort of like a pivot, where we stuck a toepick in the ice and then pushed off/did a half-swizzle around in a circle on the other foot. From there we went on to doing what I've been calling backward half-swizzles in a straight line; apparently this is pretty much equivalent to backward stroking. I was happy about that since can do those quite well. We worked at that a bit, then went to backward crossovers again. I am still hesitant about them, I need to work them a lot more. After that we went on to look at forward edges on a circle. My right edges still (not surprisingly) leave a lot to be desired.

After the lesson Ashley and I skated for quite some time (Desiree left fairly quickly). Ashley's 3-turns are awesome, she has been working on them diligently and they are much, much better than mine. In fairness I've not touched them much since I hurt my shoulder. I tried a few tonight and they hurt a bit but not too much. I also worked a lot on my edges and right-foot glides (RFO especially). It's a little better. I worked on forward crossovers a little but not a huge amount.

A lot of people were falling down tonight -- it was almost as if something was in the air. Ashley fell down at least 5 times. My little buddies Heaven and Veronica and Mariah all fell down several times, which is not surprising except that one of them was hard enough it made poor Veronica cry. And the girls' older sister Kira fell a couple of times, once badly. Finally as we were all leaving for the evening, Kira slipped in a puddle of water on the floor in the lobby and hurt her knee. We had to help her out to the car, poor thing. A bad karma night for falling!