Process

My lesson with JJ this morning on the 7:30 a.m. FS at Gilbert.  As usual good ice and not crowded at all!  I had not skated since Wednesday (!) so I felt a little rusty, but not nearly as much as I expected.  (Yay me!)

Today's lesson:

• lunge -- JJ asked me if I'd been practicing my lunge and of course I had to say "not really!" so we worked on it briefly; mostly on getting lower.  JJ showed me an exercise, basically doing the lunge at the boards with the free leg up in the boards at an open door and then lunging.  It's a lot easier to work on getting lower this way.  My back knee doesn't really like being turned sideways though, but I think it will get better.
• 1 foot spin -- JJ asked me to think of two things to think about as I did the spin (I chose getting a nicely bent skating knee on the entry, and the final arm position).  Then he had me do a spin (eh), then asked me to think about the things I'd pictured but to think about them as process not things to remember -- in other words, to make those things part of my spin-process.  It made sense to me better than I'm conveying here... anyway we spent some time on them.  The good news is that I had some pretty fast spins that I didn't bail on.  The bad news is that they are still inconsistent.
• 2-foot spin -- I reeled off a pretty good one right off the bat and JJ was pleased :-) so we went on.
• waltz jump -- more process.  We worked on more or less the same stuff as last week, starting from a T as well as moving -- keeping the hands together, bending the skating knee on the FO edge as the hands come back and then jumping.  I did a couple that were not too bad but I need to solidify this.

All in all a good lesson.  After the lesson I stayed for the next session (1.5 hrs total) and worked on spins, waltz jump and also ran the FXO-BXOs and worked on the Bronze F8 pattern.  I'm amused that I can't get around the circle in my FS skates now when it's so much easier in my patch blades.  Oh well.