Perseverance

Today was one of those days. In spite of being off except for a conference call at 8 a.m., I didn't get to the rink until 12:30 so I missed most of coffee club and only had about 5 minutes to warm up before the lesson. I felt kind of.. just off, a bit.

The lesson was just three of us, and we worked on forward crossovers some more. Cecilia gave me some time to just work by myself and she held my hand and had me do the crossover and hold on the LFO and crossed-over RFI. Hard! I'm making very slow progress on these, most of the time when I try them they are pretty clunky and awkward, not smooth at all. I need to bend my knees more and have better balance -- Cecilia says I'm basically falling onto my RFI, which sounds about right.

After crossovers we worked briefly again on backward skating, and then on 1-foot glides. Cecilia complimented my left-foot glide and gave me some pointers on the right foot -- mostly to establish my balance sooner/quicker and to not raise the right shoulder.

After coffee club I skated another 1.5 hours minus a lunch break, and spent a lot of time on the backward glide, plus some time on the right foot forward glide, crossovers, LFO 3-turn and miscellaneous stuff. I was able to get a couple of left-foot backward glides of 8 seconds or so, so I know I am making progress, but it doesn't seem like it. My 3-turn is improving slightly, mostly in that my shoulder is sufficiently better that I can do one without wanting to scream :-). I also spent some time working on edges, especially RF edges. I realized last night that I haven't really been working them and I really need to spend more time on them, since better edges will help practically everything -- balance on crossovers, balance on backward glides, and of course 3-turn and Mohawk.

The last hour of the session was pretty crowded with kids but I got a fair amount done. I'm pleased with what I accomplished even though I wasn't feeling at my best.