Beginning Again, Yet Again

I had my first regular lesson with JJ this morning. The plan is that JJ will be my primary coach, working on freestyle and moves. I'm going to work with Lynne on figures and perhaps on moves at times as needed. I'll start those lessons next week due to a schedule conflict on my part. Lessons with JJ will be either Tuesday or Thursday mornings in Gilbert. Lessons with Lynne will be Wednesdays at coffee club in Chandler.

Conditions for the lesson this morning were very nice, most of the time only 3 skaters on the ice. I was on the ice at 8:15 to warmup and our lesson was at 8:30 (session is 8:15 - 9 a.m.). I had not skated since last Friday but felt reasonably good. I warmed up with Bronze moves.

Today's lesson:

• spins -- we had not looked at these in our intro lesson. I did one for him and from that he had me work first on two-foot spins from feet together (not from a pivot), working on not getting the upper body ahead of the hip and lower body. After some work this way we worked on them from a pivot. My first one from the pivot was really nice! JJ pointed out that my problem with going onto my toepick is because my upper body is getting ahead of my hip. Interesting. We went on to do a one-foot spins from the windup and had some success although I'm still bailing too quickly. JJ asked me to try to hold the free leg/foot out to balance me out on the outside edge before I hook the spin. I was actually able to do this to some extent (which surprised me).
  
• waltz jump -- we went on to these. The first couple were not so good, I was not really getting down in my knee before the jump and the landing was somewhat on the flat and wonky. After that I managed to do a couple of nice ones where I had better setup and the landing was really nice.
• salchow -- I didn't really want to look at these (I'd have rather looked at toe loop) but JJ thought we should. First he had me try one from the mohawk entrance I've been using and it was about as bad as I remembered. Then he had me try one from the LFO3 and while it had most of the same issues at least it wasn't a "spin-cow". JJ told me to think of the jump itself as just another 3-turn (after the intro 3) into a waltz jump. this really helped, for some reason, and I managed two or three that (while not good) at least took off a lot sooner and landed more-or-less in the right direction.

And with that we were out of time! I was really excited about my progress on the salchow.