Control, Control, Control

In The Empire Strikes Back, Yoda the Jedi Master tells Luke, "Control, control. You must learn control." That's how I felt during today's lesson (although Anna is a lot better-looking than Yoda!).

• back edges -- I started the lesson by talking about my observations about coming back to the line square on my BI edges and how I couldn't do the step forward as a result. So, we worked on BO and BI edges. The BI edges actually have improved a lot! I have been working them pretty obsessively and while there's still a lot to improve, of course, they are a lot more confident and flowing than even a week ago, which made me happy. We worked on getting the free foot extended back when coming back to the line, and I had some success with this. In looking at the BI edges, though, there's still a lot lacking in terms of position. I'm tending to not really have it "phased" as my forward edges are, it's just a mush of position changes.
• lunges -- the next thing I mentioned to Anna is how I've noticed I can't turn my foot out without separating my knees more than I think I should when doing a lunge. Anna said it's okay to separate them more, and that it is analogous to extension when stroking -- the free foot doesn't go straight back, it's back and out to the side. This made a lot of sense. Of course I'm not used to doing that. We worked a bit on my front-to-back lunge/3-turn with a little bit of improvement. My blockage on this is just fear, I think, which is pretty dumb since I've fallen doing these and it's not a big deal, I'm already on the ice anyway!
• program -- from there Anna wanted to look at the holiday show program again. We worked a bit on the bunnyhop section since I'm still having problems with that. It still needs more work, though.
• 3-turns -- next we looked at working toward getting the step-forward in the 3-turn pattern. I'm a bit closer on the LFO3 -- Anna says after the extension, I need to bring the free foot back to the skating foot for the step-forward (duh!) which is now the sticking point. Still, we made some progress. We worked on these doing the FO-lobe, FO3 pattern. I'm doing better at placing the turn at the top of the lobe, also. In general, though, I need to work on this step forward a lot.
• perimeter stroking -- evidently I wasn't sweating enough (:-)) as Anna had me do a couple of laps of perimeter stroking (CCW only). No great improvements but it's okay. My crossovers were a bit tentative/lacking -- on one set I was just going faster than I'm used to (!) and I chickened out. What I should have done (Anna nodded when I said this) was to bend my skating knee more. Anna mentioned in passing that when doing these I shouldn't be so close to the boards. I'd been doing them roughly 8 - 10 feet from the boards but Anna says I should follow the line of the "pepperoni dots" and start the crossovers just after the last dot. I suspect she didn't tell me this before because I wouldn't have felt too comfy doing the crossovers in that limited a space. Or, she just didn't think of it :-).

That was it. After my lesson I skated for about another 75 minutes or so on the public session. I worked a bit on the LFI3s (grrr!) and also on the spin entry. I need to ask Anna about that, because I'm not sure where exactly I'm supposed to be looking at the various points in that windup. It's getting better (I'm actually getting the free foot into almost the right position) but I'm still not doing the step forward. Oh well, Rome wasn't built in a day.