Adventures in the Harness and Camels

Another fantastic week of skating and I'm not posting until Monday! I'm not going to lie, after this weekend I pretty much feel like a skating rockstar. In my lesson Friday, we didn't get a chance to work in the harness at all like I had been looking forward to all week. As it turned out, however, my blades were so dull that I couldn't have worked on Axels anyway. So after having them sharpened that evening, I hit my coach up on Saturday morning for some harness practice. First we ran through a few Axel walk throughs which is where you do a baby Waltz jump (as in from a standstill) and then land in a backspin, or in my case, a backspin slide :-). Then we did some nice big Waltz jumps with the harness on just to get the feel of things. Think of being in the harness as sort of a brain game. I thought my coach was actually pulling me up on the Waltz jumps, which she wasn't, so I was jumping REALLY high since I thought I wouldn't fall. I didn't of course, but like I said, it's a head trick. The tricky part about leaning how to do an Axel in the harness is that you take a very straight approach when it's much easier to do a nice 1/2 circle approach. The harness cable goes straight down the long side of the rink and you have about 3 feet on either side of the cable. So that's a 6 foot width to work with. Not much at all! The first several ones were really just figuring out how and when to snap into the backspin position and then getting my arms in sync with my leg. I wasn't getting any help with the jump, it was just the landing. My coach says it's normal for a skater who is learning a new jump to get up and rotate fine but then just crumple as they hit the ground, so they usually end up pulling you up so that you don't kill yourself. Which is strange when you're trying to land the jump because you almost feel like you can't find the ground when you're coming down! After a few attempts I started rotating better and landing them and all of a sudden I threw one that I landed fairly well. My coach said, "I'm not pulling you I'm just holding the rope. That was all you." SWEEEEEEEEEETTTTTT! I threw a couple more decent ones and a couple more 'waxels' AKA wacky Axels. Don't ask me, I don't come up with the terminology. I'm hoping to squeeze in another 15 or 20 minutes on the harness this Saturday and my goals is to get them very consistent this time so that my coach will let me throw them out of the harness. We have an open house in two weeks and I'm helping demonstrate things, so my goal is to be able to demonstrate an Axel there. We shall see :-). In other news, I started doing some camel spins on Thursday in class. Oh yes, I now have an instructor from the school of figure skating, not ice dancing, so my problem is fixed. I heart my coach who took care of this. She said I actually was getting into the correct position perfectly but I was really only rotating once. Friday, my coach and I worked on it and were able to get 2 revolutions. Saturday I stretched three out of it once and Sunday, insert drumroll please, I had 5 revs two separate times! I was pretty happy! Especially since I don't consider spinning my strong point, to not have to fight a spin for once would be great. I fought that stupid scratch spin for nearly four months, my backspin still stinks, and my sit spin, although only a couple of weeks old, is not very pretty. Although, I should mention that my coach feels like it's fairly close and we're slated to work on camel-sit combos this week as she thinks I'll nail that one right down and then I'll be able to do solo sits. I think we are going to start working on putting together my program either this week or next as we are about 10 weeks away from the Halloween competition on October 30th. My coach likes to have her skaters have at least 8 weeks on a program before they compete with it. I'm wondering if she's not trying to give my spins AKA backspin, sit and camel an extra week or two to get good enough to put in there. I'm not thinking that the backspin is going to be good enough but maybe the camel will and if I'm super lucky a camel-sit. I need a minimum of 2 and a maximum of 3 spins but I think they can even be the same spin, but who would want to do that?! And I'm also hoping that I get to throw a flip-loop-toe loop combo as I FLY though the air when I do those! It's the one combination with a loop that I really get some height on but go figure since it starts with 'my jump' the flip. Well I think that's about all that's gone on this week, cross your fingers that I can get that camel consistent and nail my Axel this weekend and I'll keep you posted!

Loop de loop de loop de loop

Well it has happened.....I thought it wouldn't but lo and behold the elusive loop jump finally clicked today! First I should probably apologize for not updating the blog last week, it was a bit of a hectic week with work last week! But back to the lovely loop jump.... I was a bit frustrated with the loop jump as I have previously stated. It didn't help that I was getting differences in coaching as well. I am in a jumps and spins class on Thursdays and my coach (who ROCKS!) always takes the 'high' skaters AKA the girls throwing doubles and combo spins. Hopefully I'll be in their group by next summer. But anyway, there's a very good reason why she always works with them. Different coaches obviously have different styles of teaching. My coach is also all of the high skaters' coach and doesn't want any other coaches messing up their jumps. Not to mention that they won't jump for one of the other two coaches that teaches the class. She's very nice and means well and is a great ice dancing coach but that's about where it stops. Her background is in ice dancing, not freestyle, and it really shows with her coaching. She pushes the higher skaters to do jumps and combos that they aren't ready for and tries to completely change their jumps. Of course, the problem then is also that skating is largely dependent on muscle memory so time spent changing a jump incorrectly ends up being more time spent correcting it. Two steps forward and one step back essentially. So I have had this coach teaching me for the last few weeks. I don't want to speak badly of her as she is certainly a good person and a good coach but her training is in ice dancing. It's like a figure skating coach teaching hockey. It just doesn't work. So two weeks ago when my coach left for a week of vacation, she left me with the assignment of getting all of my toe loop and loop combos. Toe loops were no problem but I was really struggling with the loop, especially with just a single loop and even a loop combo was really only intermittently working for me on the toe loop and Salchow. Then this coach keeps pushing me to really kick forward on all of my jumps....to the point of practically doing a split jump on every jump. Not only was this really messing up my jumps, but I could barely even land half of them, let alone try to get into a loop combo! Needless to say I was very happy to get my wonderful coach back this week and I informed her I wasn't jumping for this other coach anymore. I was welcomed into the ever growing folds of skaters at the rink that also feel this way. After spending most of my lesson on Friday fixing my jumps, we started talking about putting together my program for my first competition (YEA get EXCITED!) at the end of October. We decided on three jump combos: Flip-toe loop, toe loop-loop and Salchow-loop. Then a solo flip and solo loop. And maybe one other solo jump. It wasn't set in stone yet but obviously I'm already rolling my eyes because I'm not landing loops very consistently. So I just went out this morning and decided that I was going to kick the loop's butt. I was not getting off that ice without figuring it out. So I decided to revert back to what my coach had originally shown me when learning the loop, as in scrapping this straight line intro that the other coach had me doing. I went back to the forward 3 turn entrance into the backspin position to take off for the jump and after doing that a couple of times from a standstill I went back to the circle and set it up wider just like a toe loop. It worked like a dream. And suddenly, the light bulb went on! I realized that when you wanted to come down into a loop combo set up you had to 'flip' or switch your hips around in the air, mid jump. Bam! Just like that I was able to throw loop combos on all five single jumps. The only thing I had trouble with was the Waltz jump. I think I need to just throw a straight Axel because I was over rotating it to get into a loop. I was very excited. I'm not sure if we will really change my jumps around but it does open up a couple of other possibilities. I like the flip-toe loop combo though because I feel like I really fly though the air on it. Other than the loop jump I've just started working on sit spins and I can tell I'm actually fairly close to getting them, I think a week or two of squats, squats and more squats will really help that out. I'm looking forward to another great week of practice and I get to put in harness time this week.....I fully plan on winning that bet I made of having a double by the second week of September! I can't stand to loose! Oh so since I didn't write last week, I should mention that I did attempt to throw a double Salchow last week, and I got one and 1/2 revolutions out of it. I think I really need the harness just to figure out what the rotation feels like, because I kept wanting to put my foot down too early. So hopefully I'll be a rockstar and land my Axel at least speedily and of course and double of something quickly! I will keep you posted....:-)