Week of Skating Brilliance!

Well all in all it's been a really wonderful week of skating! The two main highlights of the week have been learning my flip all on my own and fixing my messing scratch spin. I've been playing around with my flip here and there and never really sat down to work on it because I was waiting for my coach to bring it up. But I decided to take some initiative and spent about ten minutes working on it Thursday morning during my hour long practice before my jumps and spins class. I kept just slightly putting my left toe pick down before landing on my right foot and I was getting frustrated. As I told myself to really throw my right leg around on the next jump, my coach just happened to be walking by the windows looking in. I didn't see her as I jumped and actually landed the jump properly for the first time. As I'm coming out of the landing I see her waving, clapping and thumbs-up-ing me through the glass. That was really cool that she just happened to see the first one that I landed! Then it only got better as we finally fixed my scratch spin. I guess I tend to drop or pull my arms in towards my sides instead of out and around when I'm spinning, which causes me to push up onto my toe pick and loose my center as I spin. I usually only get 4-6 revolutions before I am forced to get out of the spin. So, Gia had me grab one of my skate guards and hold it in my left hand. She said as I spun I had to hold the guard straight out and bring my right hand around and grab it but still hold it straight out in front of me. First try, I centered up beautifully and only exited the spin because I wanted to. That's how you know you're landing a jump well and spinning well is when you CHOOSE to move on or out instead of being FORCED to in order to avoid falling. So now I'm spinning with my skate guard and hopefully I will get the muscle memory down quickly because I get to test at the end of July! I'm secretly hoping that I get to test through Adult Pre-Bronze and test into Bronze because my coach was showing me power 3 turns yesterday which is a Bronze MIF (move in the field). But that means I really have to work on my backspin because I only get a couple of rev's on it....but I just learned it last week too. It and the sit spin are both on the Bronze Freestyle test and will be the only two elements that I really will have to focus on for the next five weeks. So in the meantime, I'm going to put in as much ice time as I can and work harder than ever. I also found a great practice dress online that I'm ordering so that I can practice and test in it. Fun but not too much sparkle, good for testing in. Also very affordable at a modest $100 for custom measurements. I really like that! So all in all, it's been a good week of practice and Thursday provided me with a really great birthday present at practice with my jump and spin!