Spins!

I was in Oregon for work and managed to squeeze in a couple of hours of skating.  Sonya was kind enough to squeeze me into her schedule, so I had a lesson with her at 6:30 a.m. (I skated from 6 - 8 a.m.).  Not too crowded at all (I think 4 or 5 skaters tops) and Sherwood's beautiful ice (really, it is beautiful).

We spent our lesson working on spins.  We started off doing some two-foot spins for review.  Then I did a couple of one-foot spins, and Sonya had me do two different exercises to work on problem areas.  The first (one I've done before) was to do a two-foot spin and pick the R foot up.  The second (new to me) was to do a hockey glide into the spin.  I'd tried that before a long time ago but never managed it before.  I did make it this time though -- I find it challenging to bend my knees that much.  Anyway we made some great progress!  I had a couple of 4-rev spins and more that were 3 rev, and much more solid.  I think the main differences were that I was bending my skating knee more on the step forward and especially that Sonya had me working on extending the L arm more on the step forward, while still standing up straight.  There's more to do but I am REALLY excited by my progress!

Here are two videos Sonya took for me:



This one is not quite as good maybe:


After my lesson I had another hour to skate.  I also got to enjoy the company of several of my SIA homies -- Madison, Casey, and Sierra (Karly was there earlier also).  I worked on spins some more and was able to do several other good ones.  Yay!