Basics

My lesson with JJ.  Since Gilbert's ice is down this week, we had our lesson on the 8:15 FS at Chandler.

At the beginning we played the cut of my FS music that I just received.  I like it a lot!  The ending does sneak up on you though, so I'll have to be careful.  It's a bit repetitive, so JJ says I will have to pay a lot of attention to my gestures and transitions.

After that we worked on basics:

• deep swizzles -- I had complained that I feel like since I came back on the ice I'm not very grounded, not very into the ice.  So JJ had me do some swizzles around the rink, forward and back; he had me bending my kneeds deeply first (taking care not to lean forward) and then swizzling.  Lather, rinse, repeat.  Ugh, these are tiring!
• swing rolls -- next he had me working on swing rolls (forward and back, ugh! just FI and BI though), working to bend the knees and make the lobes small but keeping some speed.  They got better.
• edges/shallow swing rolls -- not sure what to call these, but they are like swing rolls only instead of a lobe, just skating a shallow crescent and alternating feet.  Same idea though -- keep bending the knees into the ice.

All in all, good stuff, although if I want to get any benefit from this I will have to actually work on this stuff.  I've been really focused on the figures competition and so not really thinking much about free skating but will have to get more serious if I want to get back to where I was.

After we came off the ice JJ spent a couple of minutes working some off-ice stuff with me -- basically hopping back and forth on one foot.  First side to side, and then forward and back.  The goal is to land on one foot and not have any little hops to maintain balance.  Hmm.

I'm feeling like there's so much I need to do!  On the free skate side, I want to work hard to at least get back to where I was AND fix my toe loop like I was starting to do when I got hurt.  I also have a free skate AND a light program to work on (Holly is going to choreo that) AND I will need to brush up my dramatic for Autumn Antics.  And of course there's the duet... AND I want to get back to back-3s.

On the figures side I have the competition and I really, really want to fix the darn waltz-8 and pass the stupid test so I can move on to something more interesting.

And of course I need to get to the gym more to rehab my knee and improve my core strength. 

AGGGH!!!