Freestyle Stuff

Today's lesson was spent entirely on freestyle stuff, especially since for some reason the adult session was really crowded. I had today off so I had plenty of time for once.

• lunges -- We worked on these for a while. The RF lunge is improving, but I need to work still on keeping the free side up. On the LF lunge (my better one) Anna wants me to get the knee bent even farther; she wants me to keep getting further down until I approach the "breaking point", i.e. the point where it's hard to get up again. This is another one of those areas where she wants me to push my limits out. The RF one is still a challenge just to get the left leg down behind me instead of out to the side, and then to keep it.
  
• spirals -- These are looking okay. We experimented with doing them "straight" vs. trying to open the free hip/side. After some tries each way, Anna wants to stick with keeping them straight. These are definitely improving, even the RF one. Anna wants me to work harder to keep the free leg straight (unbent) from the very beginning of the spiral, though -- no starting to get into position with a bent leg and then straightening it later! Nicole went by as we were working on these and was very impressed with my progress.
  
• mazurkas -- We worked these a bit more, to get more of that prancy "Katlynn McNab" :-) look. Anna wants me to make my steps smaller and get my feet closer together. Surprisingly the leftward one looks almost as good at the rightward one. Anna wants some ankle action to get a better jump.
  
• bunnyhops -- We spent some time on these, fixing a number of things -- keeping the hands together and bringing them back further and then up higher; fixing the rhythm of the right leg going back and then coming forward and syncing it up with the arms better. By the time we were done they looked much, much better -- more like a "real jump" almost. We also worked on getting the left leg bent a bit more and trying to combine the knee action with more ankle action to get a higher, better jump. Anna also wants more push-off from the right toepick landing.
• back stroking/push-off -- Just before the end of the lesson we spent a couple of minutes looking at this, pushing off into a back glide and keeping the foot in front. Anna was surprised how much better these are; but I have been working on them, and it showed.
  

For Monday Anna says we'll look at back edges. After my lesson we had time for a birthday lunch, since a bunch of the coffee clubbers have birthdays around this time. We had a nice lunch of pizza and salad, and folks had brought goodies for dessert. It was a lot of fun. After lunch there was no one on the public ice so I couldn't resist; I went and skated for two more hours on the public session. It was so uncrowded and the ice was so nice!

I worked a lot of stuff, but especially crossovers, those RFI-LBI Mohawk combos, and back edges. On the crossovers I worked harder at keeping turned into the circle and keeping the trailing arm/shoulder back and up; my mental image is having my arms (actively) stretching out on a 2 x 4. This combined with trying to keep down in my knees resulted in some of the best crossovers (even CW!) that I've ever done. It was really cool!

On the back edges my one insight/breakthrough was that when I'm pushing off onto the RBO I tend to feel like I can't hold the edge; but by trying to get a better kneebend I was able to drastically improve the RBO so that I could comfortably hold it; it feels more like the LBO now. I was really pleased with this insight. Of course my BO edges are still nowhere near testable, but at least I'm more or less able to do them. The BI edges are another story, still; but I guess we'll work those Monday.