Mohawk Combo From Hell

So because of the equipment problems I mentioned in the previous post, the rink cancelled the freestyle sessions for today and just had the public session on Rink 2. I called Anna after the adult skate, when I found this out, and asked her what she'd like to do. Since the other two students for Monday were sick and out of town, respectively, she said she'd take me at 4:30 (since I had the day off).

I got to the rink about 3:45 or so and had plenty of time to warm up. The ice was pretty bad since it had not been surfaced at all since before the adult skate, as far as I could tell. It was crowded since it had a few "civilians" plus most of the kids who would have been at the freestyle. I did my best to get warmed up and work some stuff out.

When Anna got there we surveyed the ice and crowd, and decided to start working on Mohawks. We started out working them on the hockey goal, Anna pressing me to keep my head/eyes up and to try harder to hold the exit edge. Then we moved to the circle and worked on the Mohawk - back Mohawk combo for a little bit, then on to the Basic 8 move we've been working on (a.k.a. the Mohawk combo from Hell :-)). I had to work this several times in both directions and wasn't in the mood to, but Anna seemed in a mood too -- I think it was a "let's fix this stuff now" mood. So we worked on the combo and in particular Anna emphasized doing the two crossovers and then straight into the Mohawk, no hesitation or other steps, just boom do it. Which of course is actually fine once I really make up my mind to do it... then we worked on just the cross step since that's the part that's actually giving me trouble. Anna said part of my difficulty is that I'm (again) hesitating to do the step, which just allows me time to think about it and freak myself out and get out of position. She said I really need to maintain the position and the BO edge. Fortunately my BO edges are a lot better than they used to be or I wouldn't be able to do this at all. Anyway, we spent a long time working on this, with some improvement. Anna said the Mohawks have improved.

For the last part of the lesson we looked at back crossovers again. Anna wants to fix some things about my technique but I was having some trouble understanding exactly what she's getting at. Partly it's something she's mentioned before, that the outside foot stroke needs to be smaller. But she also wanted me to... not make the inside leg stroke so large? I wasn't clear on this, and we were out of time (they were kicking everyone out and bringing the Zamboni out) so Anna said we'd come back to this on Friday.