spark or splat 18th 24th

[flo]

Spark: Skating more in the new boots,and the jumps involving left back inside edge (flip, salchow) seem to be more stable. I've also managed a couple of decent camel-fly-camels.

Splat: Still getting use to new blade placement and collecting several new bruises. Also have tendonitis from lace bite - more of a lace chomp than a bite. 8O

[Debbie S]

Ouch, flo, I hope you feel better soon. I, too, am still dealing with some lace bite even though I had the rubber lining in the tongues replaced with lambswool. Since I can't wear bunga pads, my coach recommended something called moleskin - I think it's sold in the foot care products section in grocery/drug stores -it's supposed to be soft on one side and has an adhesive on the other and prevents rubbing.

Spark: Ran through the Bronze moves in practice yesterday - they're all improving, except for maybe the power 3s. :roll: My moves coach thinks the 5-step might be my strongest move - now there's something I never expected. Maybe I'm a closet ice dancer - lol! Actually, anything forward is easier for me than backward. I can feel myself running out of steam on the second side of the back perimeter and edge glide moves.

My moves coach adjusted the blade on my right skate and it feels easier to get on an outside edge. I now have a backspin! And my loop jump landings seem more secure, instead of looking like I'm hanging on for dear life.

Got a chance to do my run-through - at the end of the session. That was by design, since my event at the Halloween Classic occurs after 2 hours of skating, right before a resurface. So I better get used to spinning and jumping in ruts.


Splat: I still can't seem to get my free leg high enough on the camel spin. :frus:
And I'm not having much success getting lower on the sit spin.

[batikat]

Splat
Good and bad today
Didn't get off to a great start as coach put on music at start of my lesson which was a CD from which to select music for another skater. I did not like the music and it didnt' help that it was a for a kid skater I'm not particularly fond of. I asked coach to take it off, which he did but wasn't happy about. I'm usually pretty easy-going (I think!) on ice but I didn't think I was being unreasonable in asking him not to listen to music in order to select some for another skater, during my lesson, especially as it was music I did not like and found off-putting. I can't see how he could have been listening to the music well enough to make any selections anyway if he was concentrating on my lesson. I wouldn't expect him to play my kid's music in anyone else's lessons but anyway I still ended up feeling bad for having asked him not to play this and unfortunately this whole episode put me off my skating so I didnt' feel I gave it my best. Run-throughs of my free dance were poor and twizzles terrible.

Spark
In practice after the lesson, I managed some of the best jumps and spins I've done in a while. I was also very good in that I practised my basic skating - something I'm very inclined to neglect as I like the 'fun' stuff but not the hard work that needs to be put in to do things really well.

[dbny]

Spark
I finally tightened up my tummy on FO threes, and got some sense of control in the prelim power three pattern! I think the check is coming with this too, but will have to see how the next session goes. Don't know why this has taken me so long, except that there are so very many things to think about, and my tummy is total flab :roll:

Coach made me work on prelim spiral pattern without the spirals. In the event that my hips allow me to do spirals again, I should have the pattern and power ready for them.

Splat
I know my blades need sharpening, but don't feel like making the 1.5 hour drive for it. I'm getting to the point where I'll soon be falling off the blade on a deep edge, so I really must get this done.

[luna_skater]

Splat: Ice was pretty crowded today, so I didn't get hardly any full run-throughs of my sr. silver skills in.

Spark: Started learning gold skills!! I remember watching these last fall when I was just starting skills, and thinking there was no way I was ever going to get to that stage. I've only just learned one pattern, but I feel a huge sense of accomplishment just from getting to this stage. :D

[PattyP]

Also have tendonitis from lace bite - more of a lace chomp than a bite. 8O

flo, I feel your pain. It took me 3 weeks to recover from my tendonites from lace "chomp". I had no idea how painful that could be. Hope you get better soon.

Spark: After 3 weeks off the ice, I'm back! My foot/leg is all healed and I feel good! I'm lacing the top of my boot differently and hope this prevents this problem from returning. I've skated 3 sessions with no problems.

Splat: My axel did not return to the ice with me. My landing percentage is down to 10% and I have my "Gold debut" one week from tomorrow! Ugh. :roll:
I'm going to compete my new artisitic program with coreography I've only worked on for 2 weeks and I still don't have any idea what the costume will look like. Skate SF should be interesting....

[NoVa Sk8r]

Spark: huh, what's that? :roll:
Hmm, off-ice pairs lift have become easy-breezy. Hopefully, this will translate well ON the ice.

Splat: Loops and I seemed to have forgotten how to do most of our pair elements. I don't know about her, but I feel like my mojo has been lost!

And I have a long, 3-day meeting at the end of next week (and thus a compressed work cycle at the beginning of next week), so no skating for me before the Halloween competition. :cry:
Should be interesting next weekend!

[mikawendy]

Spark--

I landed my loop and waltz-loop today!!!! :D Okay, so they were teeny weeny and probably weren't fully rotated, but I finally was able to NOT put my free leg down and I was able to take off from the waltz landing without skidding. I have been working on this for months (albeit on and off because I've been focusing on moves).

I also made progress refining my salchow today. I got better followthrough with the free leg and also better height and distance. They had been getting kind of whirly before today, so I focused on stretching out the three turn entry so it was less curvy.

Splat--
There's a test session coming up soon, so the freestyle sessions have been full of people stressing about their tests. Everyone is looking good, but the added traffic has resulted in some scary near collisions.

1.5 hours to get a sharpening, dbny? Ooof. Is that round trip or each way? I used to drive 1 hour each way for a sharpening, but luckily the pro shop was a block away from a rink that offers a nice power stroking class, so it made the drive a little more worth it.

flo--I hope your lace bite heals up in time for your competition.

[Mrs Redboots]

Well done, Mika!

First skating session since Wednesday for us; Husband's private lesson and our couples lesson.

Splat: Most of it, actually. The worst being that, just before our lesson, there was a nasty accident. I didn't see what happened, exactly, but somehow or another my coach's blade cut through one of our elite dancer's boots and into her foot, making a very nasty deep cut that she had to take to hospital to get dressed. It was a total accident, and nothing could be done to avoid it, but, as you can imagine, it cast rather a pall over the rink, especially as that dancer was due to do a qualifying competition over the next two days. We are all hoping she will be fit to skate, but it's well possible she won't be.

So, of course, our coach was a bit subdued going into our lesson. We had said we wanted to play - huh. First of all, he wanted to see our exercise where we do crossovers round the circle in both directions in Kilian and reverse Kilian hold. Okay, so we do practice these, sometimes - but for some reason our clockwise crossovers in reverse Kilian hold didn't work too well. Our hold kept slipping, for a start, and how am I supposed to keep my left shoulder forward when someone is pushing my right shoulder forward and swearing he isn't, I'd like to know????

Then we decided to work on back crossovers together, which were also fairly disastrous, especially clockwise. My coach did say "This is difficult, and most couples have trouble with it", but I've also seen couples use it to warm up with no problem. Forward crossovers hand-in-hand worked better.

And all that took up the first 25 minutes of our lesson!

Spark: However, things did improve in the last 5 minutes, since I asked whether we could do the Prelim Waltz (or British Waltz, as it is also known). Coach had never seen us do it together, and was quite impressed, although he reminded me not to shuffle!

Later, we tried a Fiesta Tango together, and I'm delighted to find the Mohawk isn't the worst of it - the whole end pattern is! But we know what we need to practice. I don't want to work on it too seriously this year - time enough to start on that in January - but we need to "keep it going". We also did a good Swing Dance, which was faster, I think, than we've managed before.

Husband has finally realised that his basic skating isn't what it should be - working on the Foxtrot has shown him up - and was working on his basics in his lesson. At last!

[jazzpants]

Splat: It's definitely skating season alright...and the rugrats and their parents are back.... :frus: I couldn't practice my program b/c of all these rugrats!!! At best, the parents are quickly there to fix the problem. At the usual... ummm... where are the parents??? :evil: I better start rearranging my skating schedule yet again so I can get in some quality ice time w/o having to deal with the rugrats... :roll:

As for "strictly me" issues... primary coach gave me a new ending b/c the other ending I had last week took too much time in the program. Now I'm supposed to do a loop landing and do a quickie RFO3 and then another one right to a forward spin. And this is NOT my usual entry to a spin, so this will be a challenge for me. (I usually go in from back crossovers and then step to a RFO3.) Not my usual pretty spin, but I managed to spin though. (I'm not even gonna speculate about trying this LAST YEAR...) :P

Spark: Well... that I made it there and back in one piece??? :lol:

[jazzpants]

Spark:

Landing more loop jumps on the correct feet, albeit the landing looks a bit funky...
I think my footwork for my program is overall solid. Just some minor things to tweak.
My new spin entry at the very end is a bit better from Thursday. (As in Thursday it was non-existent. Now it just looks funky...and occasionaly the spin actually looks good!) I got in a few good forward spins with my new spin entry...
Splat:

All spins at the beginning when I was warming up.
Speaking of warming up... the rink is REALLY cold these days! Weather is getting cooler here, so the rink just gets colder along with the weather... Took quite a while for my muscles to warm up these days.
Can't get it to look pretty enough. I'll be lucky just to get it right! :P :twisted: :lol:
Still have rugrat problems... :frus:

[sk8pics]

Spark Yesterday in my lesson I did my best ever alternating back xovers-boe's, according to my coach. They felt good and I definitely have that skill now, just need to get more speed and get over my nervousness when it's a bit more crowded. Yesterday was empty since everyone was either at Norths or at Skate America. Also in a run through of my program that I did in practice, as I started the program I saw a pair coming towards me, but I also noticed they saw me, so I just kept going and they stopped for me! :bow: I was proud of myself for just keeping on, usually I would have bailed out of something. Then my lesson was good, too, for the most part. Lately my coach has been skating pairs crossovers with me forward in a big figure 8 and it's been fun! Also have been skating back crossovers in a big figure 8 around most of the rink with an outside edge transition in between. Lots of fun! Oh, and I have an actual change edge spiral now, which is pretty cool. 8-)

No splat yesterday, but no skating for me for a week due to Skate Canada. That will be fun, but I'll miss skating myself!

Good luck to everyone testing or competing! Sorry I'll miss you guys in Aston!

Pat

[jenlyon60]

Spark: Blues today was probably just about the best I've ever skated it with my coach, well at least the first 2 patterns...somewhere in the 3rd pattern I lost focus and sort of stumbled thru the last half of it. Tango was strong except for the right cross-roll 3 although I did fix it on the 2nd run-through.

Another spark is that on my perimeter stroking I'm now consistently getting only 4 strokes down the length of the ice... and on the 4 crossovers around the end, coming pretty close to filling an Oly size rink. So the next goal is to get the 4 strokes more powerful and work towards something like 3 strokes plus a chasse to set up the crossovers around the end....

Splat: Right Cross-roll 3 in Tango. It's been giving me fits lately and it used to never bother me. Partly I think it's because the dance up to that point is stronger than it's been in the past, so I'm "launching" into the turn instead of properly bending the knee etc.