Getting Back On The Horse

At the beginning of the 5 p.m. freestyle session the skating director called everyone together and talked about the freestyle rules that were implemented last week, and how everyone needs to "play nice together" so to speak. People that don't may be suspended from the rink. In this one-rink town that's a pretty serious sentence.

After that we started my lesson. Anna wanted to work first on forward crossovers, and to start with the MITF pattern. It was a little difficult though since everyone was warming up and they kept skating into my pattern, so after a couple of minutes we gave up on that and just worked on one circle. Anna said it's her New Year's resolution for me to eliminate my toe-pushing on my crossovers (she says she makes resolutions for her skaters so she doesn't have to make them for herself! :-)). So we worked on them on the circle for a bit with some success. Anna stressed lifting the crossed-under foot from the hip, and that combined with a feeling of pushing from the heel seemed to help a lot. At least, I know what I'm supposed to do, anyway :-). She also suggested I might want to get some ankle weights and work on strengthening the muscles for the underpush. We finished this part by working again through the perimeter power crossover pattern briefly.

From there we went on to revisit bunny hops. I'd worked on these a little bit, but not a whole lot and I felt very dorky. After a bit of review though I was able to do some that were decent. Main emphasis was on having the free leg and the arms coming forward as one, and (of course) on looking up; also on jumping from the top toepick.

Finally we were back to getting on the horse... back to the waltz jump walkthrough. This was a bit rough. Anna wanted me back to stepping down onto the toepick and turning on that. I managed this a few times and then we were out of time. Anna wants me to work on this before Friday and we'll revisit it then.