First Freestyle Session

At Saturday's skate, my skate buddy Nicole mentioned that she was going to the Sunday morning freestyle session and suggested I should give it a try. Brushing aside my concerns about getting run over or getting in the way, she assured me I'd be fine. So this morning I did something I almost never do -- I got up before 8 a.m. on a Sunday! I was at the rink at 8:30 to take the ice for the 8:45 a.m. session. Freestyle sessions here are $12/hr, or $9/hr with a punch card available for the members of the figure skating club, which I am not (yet). The weekend morning freestyle sessions are on the front ice (which I like), not the back ice (yecch).

It was a really nice session. There were at most 7 or 8 skaters and one coach for the hour, and the ice was beautiful. There's no music other than what people bring. At one point the lights flickered and were off for about a second; then the emergency lights were on for a while until the regular lights could warm up and come back on. For that period of time (maybe 3 - 5 minutes) it was dim but not dark -- actually it was kind of neat.

I worked on most all of my stuff, although I didn't have time to do my full practice card since after warmup I probably had 45 minutes. I did manage some really nice LFO3s and some good Mohawks. I worked on spins and forward/back crossovers too. On my CW back crossovers I went ahead and starting putting the step in (Anna had suggested on Friday that I should play with that), so they are real crossovers. I'm rather proud of them; when I actually take some time and really push that back foot I think they are really pretty good looking for a beginner.

I forgot to mention in my last post that Saturday I experimented with a back Mohawk (a.k.a. "step-forward"). I can do this, albeit slowly -- just the LBO to RFO step. I think I did one of these a long long time ago in a lesson with Linda (I think it was a Saturday make-up lesson in December), but I'd never gone back. Anyway it's a bit tentative but something new to play with.

I really liked the session and it's nice to have a skating buddy to go with -- mutual encouragement is a really helpful thing for us adult skaters! It fits well with my schedule so long as I'm not out toooo late Saturday night. Nicole and I agreed we'd make it a plan to go every week more or less.