Waltz Jump Entrance

One word description of today's lesson:

Whee!

Here's what we did:

• FI3s -- I was working on these before my lesson, so Anna wanted to work on them a bit. They are improving. Anna's main feedback was that I am sometimes leaning back, and also that I need to keep my free foot close after the turn.
• Bunnyhops - As usual when we are going to work on the waltz jump, we started with bunnyhops. Again, I am tending to lean back sometimes going into these. The second set of 3 that I did was much better, except that I was going across the width of the rink so that when I finished the 3rd I was heading straight for the boards and was a little off-balance so I couldn't stop... so I turned off to the left and had a more-or-less graceful fall. It was pretty funny, actually. No harm, no foul as they say.
• Waltz jump -- so with that it was on to the waltz jump. These are definitely improving, but Anna is still working on getting me to jump higher not farther. She also wanted a "quicker" jump and said I needed to work more on the first part of the jump (prep and jump) as opposed to the second part (turn and land). Still, it's coming.
• Waltz jump entrance -- this is the part that made me go Whee! Anna had showed me the entrance a while ago but I'd not practiced it much. The sequence is: 1) CCW back crossovers to two-foot back glide, 2) rotate skinny & extend left foot behind while gliding on RBO on well-bent knee AND looking behind, 3) "collect" free foot and bring trailing hand forward, 4) step forward onto LFO while bringing arms back, 5) jump! Step #1 will eventually modulate to 2-foot glide with L foot behind and R foot ahead, but Anna said for now two-foot side-by-side back glide is fine. Anyway, we worked on this for maybe 10 minutes and after a few runthroughs to try to get the timing right (i.e. everything moving in the right sequence) she had me try it and Voila! I actually did an okay waltz jump from the entrance. I was pretty happy with that. Anna had me do one or two more and then we were out of time.

I was pretty stoked about getting this entrance in, and Anna was pleased that I'd picked it up so quickly.

At one point during the lesson Anna mentioned to me that for my next jump, she's going to skip the toe loop and salchow and go to the loop. I was rather surprised by that but Anna said she thinks it will be easier for me to learn. "Sure!" as I say :-).