New Stuff!

I'm really jazzed. Our first lesson of the new semester was tonight. In one of those weird things that seems to happen at Gateway (the relations with instructors there seems to be really poor), Glenn was not teaching us (or anyone else, as far as I can tell) tonight. Instead we had a woman named Allison who I've never met. She seems okay though. It was myself and Ashley and also Luz, who has apparently decided not to take privates after all -- instead she's going to do drop-in lessons when she can.

We had a really good lesson! We looked at a bunch of stuff we already knew how to do -- forward crossovers, all four forward 3-turns, T-stops. We learned a bunch of new stuff:

• 2-foot spin
  
• hockey stop
  
• side toe hop
  

All of those are things I've really wanted to learn. I now have far more stuff to practice than I have practice time...

The lesson reminded me of something I already knew -- I really need to work on my CW turns. I can't for the life of me do an RFO 3-turn. I turn into it (I can do the RFO edge just fine) but then I sit there... and can't convince myself to do the turn-and-check. Sheesh. And while I'm making some small progress on my CCW crossovers, my CW stink royally. More stuff to practice!

After the lesson I spent a goodly amount of time working on the new stuff, in particular the spin (yea!) and the hockey stop. I went all around the rink starting and stopping. It's good. Of course I'm only turning CCW! The spin is a bit iffy, this is basically doing an RFI pivot into the spin, and no exit at this point. I have trouble getting the spin going, it's going to require some work.

The side toe hop is a little bit tricky for me. I can get up on my toes and hop all I want, it's the transition to a glide when you're done that seems to be the tricky part.

As I was working on my crossovers, I caught my right toepick and fell. Not too hard, but as I mentioned in my previous entry I'd not fallen in a while. So I was kind of relieved to have fallen. Even though my shoulder is not yet 100% I was able to catch myself just fine, which is good to know.

I stayed until about 9 p.m. (there was no Z-break). I'm really pleased about my skating right now, mostly because with the stuff we did today I've been exposed to almost everything up through Basic 5. I have a lot of work to do since most of that stuff I can barely do (like back crossovers!) but at least I know what it is; theoretically at least I could practice it all all on my own. If only I had 10 hours a week to skate, I'd be fantastic...