Crossovers, Crossrolls, Slaloms And Spins

My lesson with Sonya on the 7 a.m. FS at MountainView.

Today's lesson was mostly on skating skills:

• crossovers -- Sonya worked through some drills with me -- swizzle pump x2, push and hold the edge; two foot glide and cross the feet (yuck!); and then crossovers.  The CW ones were not too pleasant..
• crossrolls -- more ugh. Of course she wanted nice crossrolls where you put the free foot down and cross it on the ice.  Yikes.  The goal here in part was to get a nice knee bend and lean and it's not really happening.
• slaloms -- this was power-pull prep (forward only).  Again I am not bending my knee and ankle enough for this to really work, and my feet are too far apart.  Mmmph.
• spins -- I think we actually made some progress on these but we bumped into what I'd call my "final" nemesis -- I get about two revs in position and then I bail when I could have held it longer. Aaaah.  We tried for quite some time and I think the best I did was 2.5 revs.  I think the thing is here is not a generalized fear of falling but a more specific fear of falling backward.  Grr.  I really need to find a way around/through/over that or I'm never going to get this.

All in all it was a pretty good lesson, and she left me with things to practice.  Unfortunately with my change of jobs this is probably my last lesson with Sonya for the foreseeable future as my visits to Portland will be rarer and probably only on weekends when Sonya's not teaching.  *sigh*