Trial Lesson With Sonya

This morning I had my trial lesson with Sonya at 7 a.m., on the 6:30 a.m. FS at Shiny Rink. This is a fairly crowded FS session.

Today's lesson:

• Stroking -- of course! We started off CW, which on a session this busy was a bit interesting. Main corrections were extension and posture (don't look down), and then some feedback on the FXOs which led naturally to...
  
• FXOs -- we worked these pretty hard, and the work that I've been putting in lately on skating crossed is starting to pay off. I still don't have any real underpush but at least I can actually do the cross & hold on the good side (the bad side is, well, bad still). I did have a rather dumb fall on these, which sent me for about 10 or 15 feet on my hands and knees... "whee!" :-)
  
• Edges -- worked all of these. Forward were okay. BO and BI, Sonya worked with me on the pushoff to be more aggressive and get more push... wow! Immediate improvement! It was very gratifying. Other than the pushoff we worked on similar issues (keeping free foot in front, etc.) and also body position.
  
• Spin entrance -- we only had about 4 minutes on this. Sonya had me do one from the windup (she said the windup itself looked good), then looked at the trace and showed me how I need to be stepping "back" more, that is, I'm not stepping enough back toward where I came. I tried this and was actually able to step forward and do a two-foot spin, so I was quite pleased and impressed. Then we tried it on one foot and I couldn't reproduce my success :-(. And with that we were out of time.
  

After the session we spent a couple of minutes chatting. She has been coaching for 14 years. She tested up through Intermediate FS and did figures and some dance also. Her highest level student is working on Senior MITF. She only has one adult student, a girl she's taught for a long time. She's got PSA master ratings etc. (I'm not that interested in those so I tend to not remember them)

I'll post separately about my coaching decision.