Well, I definitely relate to this thread right now. In my competition last night, I survived every element and got a pretty good 2nd mark, but I am reeling from the "tough love" shown by the technical panel, which was particularly strict. Not only did I get a weird call on one of the spiral features, but I had *four* elements that got zero credit! I got an under-rotation call on one of my axels (which looked less than 1/4 turn cheated when I watched it in slow motion) and I got "Mrs. Dash" on all three of my spins! On two of the three spins, it was due to IJS technicalities, so I clearly need to plan my mistakes better to make sure I get at least partial credit on spins that are a little off.

After working so hard to make the "clean program" the new norm, this is pretty disappointing. What do I do with that? I guess just use the information to try to fix these particular mistakes and figure out how to make sure I don't make the same mistakes next time. If you make different mistakes each time, that can be considered progress, right?

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"You don't have to put an age limit on your dreams." - Dara Torres, 41, after her 2nd medal at the 2008 Olympics

We discuss this a lot around here...sometimes it seems as if the coaches feel that adults skaters aren't as important as kid skaters, and therefore we are the first to have our lessons canceled if there's a conflict or a problem, and the most likely to be considered unreasonable if we are upset or have a hissy fit when we skate badly, have a horrid practice, or get placed last in competition.

Probably we should make a point of telling people that since it's about a hundred times harder for an adult to schedule time to skate and have lessons around all the other responsibilites we have, it means we care about skating about a hundred times MORE than the kids do, or we would all quit!!!

(Sorry to get up on a soapbox about this but, as I said, some of us in this area discuss this a lot and it's a pet peeve of mine!!)

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You miss 100% of the shots you never take.--Wayne Gretzky

Youch! I think I prefer 6.0 because at least the judges are blind to some of the mistakes.
I'm still struggling to work out how you "plan" mistakes. Maybe we're all meant to do video replays of our practices so that we can analyse the things the coaches miss, or are these just little mistakes which happen when nervous. But you'd think there'd be some credit for trying.
But if it's any consolation, I'm discovering that the pain does become less with time. Or rather the determination grows more!

Oh I don't think my coach is one of those coaches. I know the sort you mean and I find a lot of our adult skaters seem to think in that mentality, but generally when they have kids who skate as well. Not having kids means that I think I'm most important!
But I've also met other coaches which put their "competitive" kids before others as well and then it doesn't matter if you're a kid or an adult. I've yet to work our what the definition of "competitive kid" is, as you see some kids at a low level being worked really hard because apparently they've got some mythical talent and others not and at that level I can't really tell the difference between them. Once you get up the test system it's a bit more obvious, but at beginners how do they tell?!
But what I was meaning about my coach's reaction is that she finds the whole judging / competing so subjective she finds it really hard to explain curve ball marks. She's adament that she's not putting her kids through this and will let her kid play around on the ice, but she's not going to start coaching her. (I wonder if she'll change her mind if the kids come back and ask to skate when they're slightly older). I think she's just got an odd attitude when it comes to competitions. She's got another adult skater who gets incredibly nervous testing, so she doesn't push her to test and just lets her learn the elements and pushes her to the limit. I'm still breaking her in with regards to tests and competitions, but I do know that she makes sure she's got time to teach me each week (and my lesson schedule shifts around because of my work timetable) and she does make the effort to come to tests and competitions so she's not taken the attitude that I'm old and not worth it.
I think she just worries that us adults have a strange attitude to our leisure activity in that we are so passionate and thinks that perhaps we should treat it more like pottery class. But I think she doesn't realise that we'd end up making pottery class competitive, the passion is in the personality and we're just like this.

PS I thoroughly agree with your pet peeve. I'm sick of being the old adult doing things as everyone else says it's for the kids. And guess what the kids don't mind me being the only adult. Some of my best skating friends are 6. I guess I'm just lucky in getting coaches who don't share the attitude.

PPS I had one coach once who'd taken up golf as an adult and he was brilliant for adult learners. He understood the drive and the passion and he also understood the frustrations of learning a new skill. I think a lot of coaches could learn from his experience because they'd either raise their expectations of what we can do and our potential or they'd lower them by understanding the failings of the body with time.

The thing is, as my husband often reminds me, at our level it's "only a game". Which it is - we do it for fun, and I hope we have fun doing it. But that doesn't mean we don't take it seriously, and that we don't go out there and do the absolute best we can. For our own gratification, if for nobody else's. Ottavio Cinquanto is on record as saying that adults skate against themselves as much as against one another, and that's very true!

But it's a rare competition when I don't end up in floods of tears one way or the other - I think it is due to adrenaline and the subsequent crash. If I skate badly I'm upset, and if I skate really well (and the judges agree!) I weep for pleasure! Chocolate helps, I find, as does a hip flask..... (hmmm, do you think the RIDL match this evening is sufficient excuse to fill my hip flask?).

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Mrs Redboots
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I love my computer because my friends live in it!
Ice dancers have lovely big curves!

Now that I think about it, my father-in-law took a pottery class as an adult, and wound up building his own wheel, followed by building his own kiln, filling up half the basement with pots and eventually showing them and I think selling them as well!

I was complaining to my coach about how one of my friends, who's the only other adult skater at my home rink at my level, seems to pick things up so much more quickly than I do when I suddenly realized that the other "adult" skater is actually substantially closer to my 12 year old son's age than mine! No wonder.

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You miss 100% of the shots you never take.--Wayne Gretzky

By the size of the parent's checkbook

The kids I skate with have all had bad competitions too. We shrug, and get over it. I don't mean to be flippant but there is solace knowing that the kids don't expect skating to be perfect every time, and maybe as adults we do, because you know, we're more mature. I've also learned, from my coach, to cherish the one good thing that I did in a program eg "that was the best combo spin ever", although, and this will be the only mention, there was a competition where we could not find anything to compliment. My coach would not allow skaters to utter anything negative right after the skate, your first words had to be positive ones. Tears were my words that day. Coach said "you're still alive". Didn't feel like it. I quit competing for quite a long time after that.

I don't know about anyone else.. but if I come off the ice really happy with how I skated, I don't care (well not nearly as much) what place the judges put me in. But if I don't skate as well as I think I should have anything other than a "retry" on a test or at the bottom on the results from a competition feels like a "consolation prize". At AN last year, I knew I would come in last since it was my first year at Silver and my lutz forgot to make the trip to Lake Placid. I was THRILLED with how I skated (it was the best I could possibly have done on that particular day) and didn't even bother to look at results until a friend dragged me off several hours later to see I had come in second-to-last! In contrast, when I took my Silver FS test the 2nd time, I knew I hadn't passed and so did my coach. I found out about 20 minutes later I had passed, but it felt more like the judges were saying "we're feeling sorry for you, and we know you didn't do well, but it's probably the best you could possibly skate.. so we'll give you a mercy pass.. but don't work on anything harder because you'll never get there". So now my goal is to skate as well as I can at Silver to prove that was a really bad day... and I CAN skate much better than I did on the test... even in competition with another panel of judges watching.

The only time my placing really bothered me was in an artistic event. The two other skaters were WAY better (one did a lutz) skaters than me. HOWEVER ...one of them just basically did a freestyle with lyrics and the other one did act it up but she would break character in order to do a difficult element. I stayed in character the entire program. No I didn't do difficult elements, but I don't think that should be the point in an artistic. I see now it was really unrealistic for me to expect to be competitive against silver level skaters ...but I still think artistically speaking, mine was the better program!

j

I've only done 2 skating competitions so far, but I've done some dancing competitions as well. I think the main point is to realise that if you did badly in one competition, this does not determine that you will do badly in the other one (unless your programme or concurrents are way above your ability, but then you probably weren't expecting much from a competition in the first place). There's lots of different factors involved, such as:
(for us ladies) time of the month - illness (from severe to small little flu that goes hardly noticed) - what you ate - stress from daily life affecting your concentration - the time you skate (and get up!) - the warm-up you had - the practices you had lately (sometimes, an element just disappears at a most inappropriate time, then comes back better later on) - the competition you skated agains - the judges - just plain luck, good or bad...
And it's a combination of those factors that makes you skate (dance, play etc) well or not so well, and that combination is never the same. So the main thing is to leave that bad performance as that 1 bad performance, and not to take it as a prediction for other performances.