Perseverance

After yesterday's lesson, I felt like I'd had a wakeup call to really focus on the basics, to improve my stroking, crossovers, edges and turns. At coffee club today I spent my time on these elements.

I'm wondering if I must subconsciously think there are monsters behind my back when I skate -- it's the only explanation I can come up with to try to understand why I have so much difficulty turning my head on my back edges! I did make some progress on them though. On my 3-turns I worked on skating these from a lobe-pattern as I'd worked on a while ago with Anna -- instead of just doing them on the crease, I skate, say, an LFO lobe and then do an RFO3. I've noticed that doing 3s on the crease tends to be not enough like what the test is like. Interestingly enough I do better at placing the 3 at the top of the lobe this way than when I do them on the crease! I'm not sure why that is. I tried especially to work the RFO3 and the RFI3, and tried a couple of LFI3s as well (which are still a problem).

On the forward crossovers I am mostly focusing on getting more kneebend and trying to skate in the crossed-over position, something that is extremely difficult for me. Forget about underpush, I'd just be happy to be able to hold that FO edge of the crossed-under foot while the FI edge is there as well.

I did do a couple of spins as well, and noticed that I'm not bringing my feet together very well anymore. This is probably part and parcel with doing the one-foot spin; I'm so used to doing the one-foot spin that I pick up that free foot before I've brought it in to the skating foot, so my feet are not together. I can get away with this now, which is probably why it's happening. Before I couldn't have done the spin in that position so I couldn't be lazy like that.