RFO3!

I was, once more, tempted to title this Whee! or perhaps Yahoo!, but I'll settle for being more descriptive. I had my first (regular) private lesson with Anna today, and it was terrific!

I was not feeling well when I woke up this morning, so I called in sick to work and wound up sleeping until 2 p.m. (about 13 hours total). Not an auspicious beginning. When I got up, though, I felt much better. In any event, since I'd waited so long for this lesson I'd have gone even if I didn't feel well. As it happened, by the time my lesson rolled around I felt pretty good.

I got to the rink plenty early (7 p.m.) and so had plenty of time to get my skates on and get warmed up. After about a 20 minute warmup we started my lesson around 7:25 or so.

We started first by having me work through some warmup things, in particular the alternating 1/2 swizzles I tend to use as a warmup. Anna had me work on doing them with more kneebend and more power ("I know you have a lot more power than that!" she said). From there we also did some slaloms to work on using my knees more. Then it was on to forward crossovers. She emphasized getting turned into the circle more and getting a better body position. In general she seemed relatively happy with them though, so after looking at both the CCW and CW ones we went on to 3-turns.

On the LFO3 she emphasized: keeping my arms extended in a good position, keeping my free leg close to my body and the free foot pointed down, and not dropping my shoulders but keeping them level. With this I did some great LFO3s. We went on to the RFO3s and applied the same methodology, with the result that I finally was able to do some passable RFO3s. I was so psyched! I've been working on these for so long with so little progress, it was like the skating gods smiling on me.

From there we went to look at the FI3s, and I tried both right and left. These are going to take more work although I did one of them (RFI3) kind of okay.

At the end of the lesson we looked briefly at the RFI open Mohawk. She said I'm making too much of it, and making it too complicated. She had me try one on the circle, and it was SO much easier and better. I was really psyched. And with that, our time was up. All in all we had probably 35 minutes worth.

I could go on and on about how great this lesson was, but I'll leave it at what I've said above, except to say I have a really wonderful feeling of hope and progress that is just invaluable.

After my lesson I skated 'til 9:30, mostly working on the same stuff (FO3s, crossovers, edges, etc.). I didn't work too much on the Mohawks or FI3s. We'll be back to my usual schedule (Fridays at noon) now.