Waltz Jump Part 2

For today's lesson, we started out by looking at my back crossovers in the Moves pattern. Anna says I need to work on separating my feet more, sitting back more and then getting a better separation between the feet & thighs.

From there we went to working on bunnyhops. Anna was pleased with the height I'm getting. We worked on getting the rhythm right and being able to do two and then three in a row. I'm getting more comfortable with these and they don't feel so dorky or scary anymore.

Next we went to working on the waltz jump. We started by looking at the stepover, and then the step to the toepick. These were looking fairly good so we went to the jump itself. I managed a few, but I'm having serious problems convincing myself to engage the toepick and jump. I got into a kind of a strange place in my head on this; it was very frustrating. We alternated that with doing the stepover (which looks very nice and comfortable) and bunnyhop. I'm not sure what to say about it. In retrospect I should have tried the double bunnyhop since I think that helped when I did the waltz jump in December. Anna concluded this section by asking me to work on this every time I skate, but not to beat it to death. Probably good advice :-).

We finished with Anna asking me if I wanted her to look at anything, so I showed her my backspin. Of course I didn't get any as good as the ones from yesterday :-(. It figures! Still, I got some that were better than what she'd seen before so that was good.

One of the ironies of skating is that I should feel really good about what I accomplished today -- I was more aggressive, and things were flowing much better than when I worked on this in December. Still, I'm feeling very frustrated because I know I can do this, it's just not coming out. Grr.