Combos, Backspins, and a Competition Plan

This week's title pretty much sums it all up. I put in a lot of jump time this week and it has paid off. I'm landing really good flips and my Lutz is now coming along nicely. I'm able to tack a toe-loop on to pretty much everything. I still don't really have loop jump down, so that is my mission for this coming week. Then I should be able to really mix things up! My backspin finally started to fall into place this week and I can get about 2 revolutions out of it consistently and sometimes quite a few more. This is a huge relief to me as I was NOT getting the concept of it at first and I had read online that for many skaters who didn't start in early childhood, a backspin is often extremely hard to master, and therefore really stalls out their advancement into the Adult Bronze sector. My coach had been out of town all of last week and missed our class on Thursday so Friday was the first day I saw her. I've decided that the best payoff for lots of practice is when you can actually surprise your coach with how much you've improved on something. She liked my Lutz, which was great considering I had barely learned my flip when she left for the last competition, but it was definitely her reaction to my scratch spin that has made every fall and countless hours of work for the last 10 weeks worthwhile. If you remember from last week, I had finally figured out what I needed to do to fix my scratch spin. I started swinging my free leg around to the front more before straightening up on my skating leg. This really centered the spin much better and even though I still travel about 70% of the time, it's much more controlled, sometimes I'm perfectly centered and don't travel and regardless, I get tons of revolutions and have to be careful getting out of the spins now because I'm so dizzy! But this is a good thing. Anyway, so I told her my spin was getting a lot better and I wound up into one, praying of course, that my spin would back up my talk. I whipped into it and two turns in I could tell that I had centered up nicely. After about five or six spins my coach exclaimed, "Honey!" (which is a phrase she uses a lot) while I continued to slowly pull everything in nicely before doing a toe stop instead of exiting, so I wouldn't fall on my face. Needless to say, it had reduced her to a one-word reaction. I was VERY proud of myself! We also formulated a game plan for testing and competing. I have to say that I was hoping it would all happen a little faster but I understand at the same time that a solid, consistent routine is important before competing with it. I will be testing at the end of the month in both my Adult Pre-bronze MIF and Freestyle, which will require me to compete in Adult Pre-bronze. Which is fine....I'm jumping on an Adult Silver level and once I get my Axel, I'll be on an Adult Gold. Then there is another testing session at the end of August and I'm going to test my Adult Bronze MIF only. You can test as high as you want in MIF but it's not until you take the Freestyle test that you're required to compete at that level. Then we will start preparing a Pre-bronze program and hopefully one that is easily adjusted to work for Bronze as well. My coach says that she really wants two months of solid practice on a routine before using it to compete and test with. Also, she wants me to do at least one Pre-bronze competition or exhibition so that I can get the feel of competing and we can see how I perform in front of people. All in all, I'm really just nervous about the MIF portion of the test at the end of July. I'm still a little shaky on my Waltz-eight and my BI consecutive edges aren't quite there yet. But I still have three weeks and I plan on working harder than ever. All in all, another good week of skating. Personally, the week ended on a bit of a rocky note as I lost one of my two jobs without any warning or severance pay. I think, however, that I have been able to realign everything and should be back on track in a week or two. I may just need to put off joining my skating club for a month or two. Happy Fourth of July to all and God Bless America!