Sectionals and What I’m Working on Now

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It was energizing to see skating friends and great performances at Sectionals! The silver ladies in my age group were so good that I don’t think I’ll be moving up to silver any time soon. I saw an amazing Ina Bauer by one of them (Kim?) where she clasps her hands with arms outstretched and swings both arms up and around behind her back. I wonder how impossible it would be to do that? I don’t have that flexibility in my upper back, but WANT. Here’s my skate.

Now that I’m home I’ve started working on two of my pre-silver dances again, the Foxtrot and the Fourteenstep. I’m working on harder dances so I’m going to have to put in more work to get them. I’ve put in a fair amount of work on these but they remain hard. 

The Foxtrot has two consecutive forward outside edges on the end pattern followed by a mohawk and back outside edge. That mohawk and back edge don’t have any chance of working unless you bring the preceding forward outside edges around fully. Unfortunately I can’t do that yet, at least not in the two beats of music allotted to each of those steps. So the mohawk is pretty much strangled in its crib.

You wouldn’t think forward outside edge to forward outside edge would be difficult. Ha! Today we worked on having me step onto that first forward outside edge with the correct attack angle and lean to get it around, and bring my hips foward toward my coach on that step. I got a glimmer of how it could work, a nice breakthrough. One hint from my coach was to set my foot down with the blade angled a bit outside the circle. That keeps me from cutting off the circle at its start. It also makes it easier for me to lean away from the foot and into the circle.

Here’s how the pros do the Foxtrot.

In my PT I’m doing some functional exercises that are more like my skating. The idea is to work to maintain an aligned knee position as I do them. I’m doing a forward ‘T’ exercise and one-legged squats. Can’t find a video of the T, but it’s like a spiral or arabesque except that your leg only goes to hip height and is not turned out, and you look straight down at the floor. I hold a long wood dowel behind my back to keep everything straight. At PT I use an actual dowel, at home I use one of the balance poles from my Off-Ice Edge. Novel use of that!

Anyone else thinking of going to the ISU International Adult competition in Vancouver B.C.? There was a lot of excitement for it at Sectionals and I want to go, I live too close to pass it up. I have other goals in my skating, like pass a dance test or two before my coach leaves town for the summer, so I’ll have to be careful not to totally neglect my freestyle. Gotta get a good camel spin for my program sometime!