Fractured Fibula

Well, crud.  Yesterday's fall was worse than I'd hoped.  X-rays at urgent care say I've fractured my fibula (that's the bone on the outside of the leg) in two places.  Grr.  The good news is that it's not a weight-bearing bone and should heal just fine.  I need to do a followup with my primary care and an ortho but at this point I will be off the ice for a while. Grrr.

Ouch

My power lesson with Holly on the Gilbert adult skate.  I picked up my newly-sealed and sharpened skates at FedEx just before my lesson, and had about 20 minutes to warm up in them.

Today's lesson:

• stroking -- two (count 'em, two) hard laps.
• FXOs -- around the end circles, around the center, then around the other end.  Clockwise is still pretty rough.
• slaloms -- two laps!  Ugh but they went better than I would have thought, actually.
• twizzles -- actually, not too bad.  We did several sets up and down the line.
• mohawks -- this was inside mohawk - inside edge, change feet, repeat.  This gets at the problems I have getting into the power-3s from the back lobes.  Tough, but it was improving until...
• splat! -- Holly told me one more set of mohawks and as I started on the RFI edge I somehow started to fall backward, and in doing so my L foot caught (I think my toepick caught the ice instead of sliding out in front of me) and so I went down on my back but my ankle hyperextended or something.  The good news (and it really is good news) is that I didn't hit my head.  The bad news is I really sprained my L ankle good.  Holly took my boot off for me and Melissa got me some ice, then Holly and Ward helped me up.  Yuck.

So a few hours later, it's pretty swollen.  It actually doesn't hurt that much (ibuprofen for the win!).  I think it will be okay.  I'm icing it and doing all that good stuff.

Preliminary Test & Serpentines

I skated the Chandler adult freestyle today for my figures lesson with Lynne.  I was a little pressed for time so all I got to do was scribe circles before we started.

Today's lesson:

• edges -- not bad.  Very first FO was a little wobbly but after that all was good. BI was really, really nice -- first lobe was good size for once!
• FO8 -- not bad.  Some small issues on the LFO, I need to really lock my core better on the push and bend my knees a bit more.
• FI8 -- pretty nice.
• waltz-8 -- the first one was going really well!! and then... I got a bit forward on the 2nd RFO3 and was going to fast and kinda lost it.  We started over and it was better.  Still working to improve the step forward but otherwise not too bad.
• serpentines -- I did a complete set on each foot.  Only made it around the full distance about once on each foot :-(.    The FIO change is actually not bad, it's the FOI that is still a bit troublesome (weird!).  Needs work.

3s

My lesson with JJ on the 8:15 FS at Gilbert, as usual.

Since I still don't have my freestyle boots back (it will probably be Monday) I warmed up with edges and FO8 and some 3s.

For our lesson today we worked just on 3s, yes, the whole lesson.  We were smart and worked mostly on the RFO3 (in retrospect we should have spent some time on FI3s).  After some work there was some real improvement -- turn was much less forced and had a nice quickness that I hadn't seen in a while.  So yay, it was a worthwhile investment!

I will not be able to compete at next year's sectionals, due to a schedule conflict.  JJ and I talked about this and I think the plan is to forgo working on a free skate (I'll still do dramatic, and come up with a light program) and instead spend that time working on Bronze moves.  Ugh, so much to do!

Ice Dance Class #1 - Patch Blades!

Tonight was the first session of the summer ice dance class with Naomi at Chandler.  Unfortunately I didn't have my freestyle boots, but I'd already paid for the class so I decided (with JJ's encouragement) to go ahead and do it anyway.  It's an hour class.

We spent the first part of the class working through basic ice dance elements -- chassés, slide chassés, and cross chassés (a.k.a. the tuck-behinds in the Rhythm Blues).  All not too bad except for the cross chassés of course.  Yow.

From there we went on to review swing rolls and cross rolls.  Not too bad although getting on a flat in patch blades is kinda scary as once again we have the skidding problem :-(.

Next we spent the rest of the session working through the Canasta Tango, adding it together step by step until by the end we had run through the whole thing (including restart) a couple of times.  Yay!  Unfortunately we did not get to run it with music :-(.

I was really pleased that I was able to keep up reasonably well in my patch blades.  It was a bit scary at times -- I'm not used to going (relatively) fast in them, much less doing crossovers and swingrolls.  Yow.  But really it went remarkably well and I was pleased with myself.

There are only 7 people signed up for the class (6 of us tonight), and one other adult (my buddy Lora) so I'm not the only one.  It's smaller than last year's class, which is nice for us though maybe not so nice for the rink.

No Boots

I was in Portland on Sunday and went to check on my boots.  Unfortunately they are still not done :-(.  The waterproofing/sealing took longer to dry than anticipated, and he needed to do another coat when the blades are mounted to seal around the screws, so they probably won't be shipped to me until tomorrow.

I've gone ahead and cancelled my power lesson for this week.  I'm trying to decide if it's worthwhile trying to do my ice dance class tomorrow in patch blades or just skip it.  Eeep.