Guess What? Ice Follies

Started this week sore, but it’s a good sore.

Saturday afternoon I spent a good 45 minutes–solid–ice skating. It was too crowded to do much technique work (I really need relatively clear ice to do backward skating or work on the circles). Still, lot’s of one-foot glide work and conditioning. That evening in the nighttime session I got another 35 minutes in (cut short because my daughter got her fingers caught in the door–for which we saw the doctor Monday morning: soft tissue damage and maybe some spraining but not too bad). Still, 80 minutes of skating in one day is pretty good.

Sunday, according to the schedule I had there was no class so I decided to take advantage of it to get more conditioning in during the public skate. Usually I keep the public skate practice shorter on class days giving me time to rest up before class. As I get tired, my balance starts getting flaky.

The rink wasn’t so crowded and I got in a little bit of practice work and some work on edges on the circle. 40 minutes or so into the public skate session, Athena skated out to me to tell me there was class after all. (She’d run into one of the instructors.)

Eep.

So I stopped to rest some before class. They have two sessions of Learn to Skate, each 30 minutes long.  During those sessions they have a lane at one end of the rink marked off so folk on the other session can get in a little practice.

During the first class session (which is mostly the kids’ classes) I took about ten minutes to do some additional backward work in that “practice lane” mostly working on backward one foot glides and backward stroking. Then there was the class itself, another half hour, most of which we spent working inside and outside edges on the circles and then some backward pumps on the circle.

Finally, a bit of work with two-foot turns–this done standing trying to find the “sweet spot” of the rocker to minimize the drag in the turn.

I’ve mostly finished Basic 3, and a good chunk of Basic 4. (The “Learn to Skate USA” program has six levels of basic “learn to skate” progression).

Put together, over the weekend, I ended up with a total of more than 2 and a half hours of actual ice time. So, yeah, I was a little sore the next day.

And that’s a good thing.