Slip-Sliding Away

For today's lesson, for some reason Anna did not have her skates with her, so she was coaching from the boards. Not optimal but it worked okay. We worked on a bunch of stuff:

• perimeter stroking -- we spent just a little time on this. I'm still not getting good extension. I think it's mostly a matter of getting (of course) my weight firmly over the new skating foot so that there's no hesitation or bobbling in allowing the free foot to push and extend.
• 3-turns -- the FO3s are okay. Anna says I'm tending to have a little... not sure what to call it on the RFO3. A "hop" but a small one. Anna says the reason my BI edge curves in too much is not so much from dropping the free side (I'm doing a better job on that) but that the free hip is closing instead of staying open. She suggested trying to point the free toe as a way of getting tension in the free leg, to keep the hip open. The RFI3 is not so bad, but the LFI3 is still a problem. We're going to try to come back to it on Monday when Anna has her skates. Still, there is some improvement.
• perimeter crossovers -- Anna says the pattern looks good and I look confident, it's just the actual crossover she's not happy with yet -- that's a general problem (toepushing etc.) not specific to this pattern
• spirals -- I was finally able to do some good spirals in front of Anna! There is a problem on the LF one though of starting out with a good extended free leg and then I'm having some kind of bobble in my balance, resulting in the free leg curling in and then extending again when I have my balance back. Anna says I'm getting a little too far back on my blade.
• lunges -- we finished up with a couple of lunges. They are looking pretty good, but Anna said I need to make them deeper (down more). I said, "how low are we talking?" and Anna said this is one of those cases where we want to take it all the way and see what happens. So I did! I promptly did an LF lunge, went waaaay down, and the next thing I know I'm doing my Zamboni impression (thus the title of this post). It didn't hurt, it was actually kind of fun. We went on to the other foot and did the same thing. I guess it is somewhat helpful to know how far is too far...

And with that we were out of time. I mentioned to Anna afterward that I need to work on my acceleration/deceleration for the holiday show routine, and also that I wanted to learn the forward-to-back lunge-3-turn-lunge. She said that we could look at that Monday.