Learn To Hockey Skate Lesson 2

There's this amazing scene in Bull Duhram. The movie features a veteran minor league baseball catcher (Kevin Costner) sent to mentor a promising young pitcher (Tim Robbins) who has a lot of talent but an immature attitude.

The pitcher strikes out three straight batters, and gets lots of congratulations from his teammates. He sits next to the catcher in the dugout and asks him how great it was. The exchange:

"Your fastball was up and your curveball was hanging. In the show they would have ripped you."

"Can't you let me enjoy the moment?"

"Moment's over."

For the first 10 minutes of class, I felt pretty great about myself. I got a "someone's been practicing" from the coach during the first drill, going over stuff we learned last week.  Then the last 20 was a nice slap in the face that I'd only "mastered" (become vaguely adequate at, really) the first week of skills and there's seven more to go.

I did pretty well with my one-foot snowplow stops and something approaching acceptability with my crossover starts.  Lots more repetition is needed on the crossover starts, but I think I've got a good base to learn more advanced stops and push a little harder in that area.

Then we learned (well, he showed us) the two new skills for this week: Forwards crossovers and backwards swizzles.

Forwards crossovers are still pretty hard for me, but I can see the path to getting there.  Maybe 1 out of 6 I try are vaguely correct, mostly on my dominant side.  I'll get there with practice, I'm pretty sure.  A lot of it is just trusting my edge. It's hard to really lean and put my weight out there on a turn and feel comfortable yet, but that just takes time.

Backwards swizzles just about broke me in half.  Part of the problem is that I'm just not good at bending my feet that way. I was born with a congenital hip problem that mostly was solved but leaves me with just a slight natural tendency to have my feet turned outward.  Turning my toes inwards and leaning on the inside edge is really not easy, especially as tightly as the instructor wants us to.  I'm going to have to really work on my flexibility to get there.  Getting from one sideboards to the other trying this for the first time took me a good 3 minutes and was not remotely graceful or correct.

I skated around for maybe 15 minutes after class, but the public session had maybe three or four dozen skaters on 2/3rds of the rink.  Too many for me to feel comfortable pushing myself on some techniques that I don't really have down and could easily go flying into some toddler or something, plus the ice was pretty brutal and bumpy by that point.  I called it a night and will get back out there as soon as I can. Daytime sessions have spoiled me.

I should be able to get to the public session on Friday and maybe next Monday or Tuesday before class. That's 3.5 hours of skating to work on these things, and I hope I see some improvement. I'll keep working on my footwork and especially hip flexibility off the ice.