Waltz Jump Prep

Today's lesson was spent entirely on various aspects of the waltz jump. We worked through a number of preparatory things:

• walkthrough -- we started with this, left it for a bit, and came back to it. I'm able to do the step up/step through, the difficulty is getting all the different pieces together. Anna says I am really ready for this, I'm just not getting it quite together.
• double bunny hop -- we went back to this in an effort to feel the "jumping from the ball of the foot" thing. Again, the double BH is just jumping from the left foot, coming down again on the left foot and pushing out onto the right foot. I can do this but I have a hard time not coming down on the flat. After some repetition it got better though.
• entrance prep -- this was a new thing. I had always thought that the standard entrance was just an ordinary set of back crossovers and then a step forward. Not quite. There's a little step before that to ensure that the rotation has stopped so that you have it under control. The sequence is back crossovers, "spot" a place on the wall, bring the left foot behind (and transfer weight to it), then transfer weight back to the right foot (RBO) and pick up/extend the free leg, rotate the arms and head ("skinny" of course) while re-spotting the same place you spotted before. I worked on this but it's a little weird; and of course my RBO edges are still not as strong as they should be. Anna says I need to work it more, so of course I will.
• jump prep -- this is the scary "jumping into the boards" routine. Actually, it's not that scary. Anna showed me this quite a long time ago, it's where you do the entrance edge and hit the toepick and catch yourself by throwing yourself into the boards. Working this exercise (which I'v practiced somewhat sporadically) showed the problems I'm having coordinating all the different pieces of this jump. Inevitably I can jump from the toepick, but I'm not getting the free foot up and forward as I need to. The 3rd or 4th time I tried this today, I wound up just skating straight into the boards! It didn't hurt or anything, but I sure wished I had had a video of it because I'm sure it looked screamingly funny. It made me laugh quite a bit, it was so stooooopid. :-)

All in all a pretty good lesson. Anna says we'll work on this stuff and the spins more on Monday.