Well, shoot. I showed up at the rink at 11:30 this morning to try to get one more skating session in before class tonight, but it was closed for some event and public skating had been moved back to the afternoon. That's what I get for not checking the schedule on the site ahead of time.
So I went into tonight's lesson with no real ability to skate backwards, which is what I had been hoping to work on. The next few public sessions I need to spend a lot of time on that. My backwards swizzle is OK-ish, but I need to do one-foot backward strokes and I just can't see to grip the ice right.
Alright, we ran through the previous stuff in class to start with. Crossover starts - adequate (I mean, adequate for me and my experience level). One-foot stops - adequate, but I'm hoping to get better and stop quicker. Forwards crossovers - Improved!
Let's talk about that for a minute. Every day this past week, I've been taking the time to work on my ankle strength and flexibility, as well as my balance in the crossover position. I think it's paying off. I can do some sort of crossover and get at least a little push out of it every time. It's nowhere near as good as it needs to be, but it's *something* that an outside observer would recognize as a crossover and I don't lose all momentum.
Backwards crossovers - lol, no. I can't do a backwards crossover if I'm not actually moving backwards. It's still pretty bad. I think I did one that kind of felt OK.
Then he introduced tight turns. I didn't exactly master them in one night, but they seemed much easier than the other stuff we learned and I think I can pick these up with practice.
The public skate session was having some sort of toy drive/kids' night, there must have been 75 people skating. No point in trying to deal with that, I just skated a few laps for funsies and went home. I can go back out tomorrow and get some real practice in.
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