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!