Speed, T-Stops, 3s

I am in Santa Fe this weekend and had a chance to work with Olivia.  We skated on the public session at GCCC in the afternoon and it was beautiful ice and almost deserted.  What a bargain!  I should take ice skating vacations here. I had a good half hour warmup before we started. Here's what we worked on:

• speed -- I had asked specifically to work on this.  Olivia kicked my ass!  In a good way.. mostly. We started by doing a time trial of me skating a lap from a standing start.  My time was 48s.  Ugh.  By comparison one of Olivia's beginning students who's only been skating a month or so did it in 30s.  So... we spent a bunch of time working on getting me to consistently stroke without pausing for long periods of time.  What I learned from this -- 1) for some reason I have a real block on pushing onto my right foot.  What's up with that?  2) After 3-4 strokes my fear factor is at a pretty high level.  I'm not sure exactly why.  Anyway we spent a fair amount of time on it (Olivia can be pretty tough when she needs to, lol) and while I can say that there was some definite improvement, there's a long long way to go.  Olivia talked about how when you come out for your warmup, people form their opinion of you right away from how you carry yourself (I'm paraphrasing).  It's true.  I need to come out and skate fast and look confident, and right now I'm just not.
• t-stops -- we spent some time on these.  While I can do a decent t-stop it lacks confidence and also it doesn't really look like I finish.  Olivia wants the "bend 'n snap" (as in Legally Blonde (Melissa? :-) ) ).  As in bend in for the t-stop, then snap as you stop so  you are standing erect with head held high.  I made some progress on this but it needs practice, definitely.
• 3s -- I had been working on these before the lesson.  We had just a little time on this but Olivia wanted me to work on not swinging the arms so much and also to watch the position of the leading arm before the turn.  I was a bit confused by this.