Progress!

I skated the adult session today as usual. Anna was not there (thus my Tuesday lesson) as she is out of town. I had a number of good things happen today, it was a very rewarding skate.

• FI edges -- I usually skate FO and FI edges as part of my warmup, but in skating the FI edges today, something new happened! I was able to keep my free hip up on the darn RFI edge! This made me so happy I could have just burst. I honestly don't know what made the difference, I just know I had a sensation of "standing tall" during the edge. It was so much better! I wish Anna had been there to see it. I did it a number of times to try to lock-in some muscle memory, then I went on to other stuff.
• waltz jump walkthrough -- no big breakthroughs on this, but I did spend some quality time on it. It's not really scary anymore, so that is a good thing.
• backspin -- I couldn't resist working on this, it's so cool. I didn't have much success, but I did manage one that was probably half of a (scratchy) revolution. I'll try to spend a little bit of time on this every (or every other) session.
• forward-backward lunge/turn -- I spent a good chunk of quality time on this in an effort to get it better. After experimenting on it a number of times, I came up with the (in retrospect obvious) solution to my over-rotation problem. You probably saw this coming, but the answer is don't try so hard! I was putting too much effort into it. When I backed it off I did one that was almost perfect. It also helped to remind myself to establish a good, solid, low lunge first -- then just a little bit of pressure from the free hip and a nice, gentle turn. It doesn't need to be fast. Anyway, I was quite pleased with this.

I was talking with one of the skaters as the session started, and she mentioned that she had not been here in a while (which is true, I'd not seen her in months). Anyway, she said she'd seen me skating recently and that I had improved a lot. I guess she'd seen me working on my spins. Anyway that was a really nice thing for her to say, but of course instead of being gracious I just said something along the lines of it seeming my improvement was glacially slow. I really need to stop doing that, but I've always been bad at compliments in general (receiving, not giving), and especially when I'm generally the worst skater around it's hard to feel competent. On the other hand perhaps it keeps me from getting too cocky.

Tracy stopped by the session at the end -- it turns out she's broken a bone in her right hand! Eeep! :-( She was doing a flying camel on Monday, and as she said, it turned into a "dead camel." Strangely enough I saw her right after that, apparently, but she said she didn't realize she had a problem until a couple of hours later when it started swelling. Fortunately she doesn't have to wear a cast, just a brace for 2 - 3 weeks. Her doctor is still letting her skate, but no doubles or flying spins. I told her that would just kill me to be under such restrictions :-). Get well soon, Tracy!