Mohawk Overtime

Before today's lesson I picked up my skates from the sharpener, then headed over to the rink. I got there a bit later than I usually like to, right at 5 p.m. Still, I had a good 20 - 25 minutes to warmup.

We started the lesson by working on forward stroking; this is probably more attention than it's gotten in a while. Specific points were to (as always) push from the heel; to get better knee action when bringing the free foot in before the next stroke; and to get a rolling of the ankle on the push and delay setting the new skating foot down longer for increased power.

Next we went to forward crossovers. I'm not very happy with how these are coming. We worked on getting turned into the circle more without turning the hips. One exercise was to bring the crossing foot over and in front of the skating foot and hold the position before setting it down. I find it very hard to keep turned into the circle; and I notice on the CCW crossovers it's hard for me to keep my trailing left arm up -- residual effects of my shoulder injury last October. It's so annoying!

From there we worked on forward edges a bit -- mostly to keep the initial push shorter, and to keep the first position longer and not overly rotate.

After that we spent some time working on getting me down in my knees more, working on various slalom-style exercises.

At that point we were pretty much out of time and I assumed we were done, but Anna suggested we work on Mohawks. We spent a fair amount of time on them, since they didn't throw us off the ice until about 6:15; so we had about a 45 minute lesson all in all. Besides the usual attempts to keep looking up, we looked at the position of the free foot immediately after the turn. It appears I've been stretching it out or otherwise moving it out, which causes me to lose my balance and put my foot down after the turn. So we worked on getting me to just park the free foot beside/behind the skating foot after the turn. We also worked on getting a better rotation and a reminder to set a better edge to begin with. All in all we made some good progress. I've noticed that I am pretty comfortable with doing them on either foot, and we pretty much just alternated feet all through the lesson. Interesting stuff.