dreamshark

...that I'm having to fight the urge to find someplace to skate again today. No, really! I just poke along for weeks at my skating making no discernible progress and then I have these great little breakthrough that are so exciting that I skate until my feet hurt. Yesterday, after working on backward skating for the last month with no discernible progress, I suddenly found that I could do a back crossover to the left without hardly thinking about it! I still haven't done it on a circle, but that's just a nicety. I've found that it works better for me to develop a new move in "free-range skating" first and then reign it in to the requisite circle pattern. Most of the instructors want to start everything on the circle, but I tend to get too focused on the marks in the ice and lose track of what my body is doing.

that you don't have to lift the front foot, the one that is crossing over! Somebody finally told me this 2 weeks ago and showed me some intermediate learning steps that worked for me (assuming we're going to the left, which is the easy way for me).

1) Skate straight backwards, circling the right foot out and back on an inside edge to get momentum.
2) Start bringing the circling right foot all the way in front of the other foot in a kind of swirly S pattern. While learning this, it's a good idea to alternate legs.
3) Twist the hips a little more during the swirly, and suddenly you're on a back outside edge, curving back to the left instead of straight. This is also a good one to practice while alternating legs to get the hip motion. I spent a good part of two practice sessions practicing this.
4) Here's the step where you go from back pumps to a back crossover. When the right foot is at the deepest point of the swirl, just lift up the left foot, leaving it crossed over behind. This is easier than it sounds - it actually helps you balance on the right foot, which should now be on an inside edge.
5) Eventually you have to do something with that left foot. Just do the obvious - uncross it and set it down.

Once I finally got this, it became obvious why it's so much easier for me to do crossovers to the LEFT even though my strong leg is the right one. It's the foot that's crossing over that is doing all the work. Actually, Instructor Mary (the senior one, who really knows what she's doing) says that both legs are supposed to be working equally hard, and if my form was better they probably would be. But the crossover foot is the one that runs the show. This is somehow more obvious when you're going backwards, but is also true on forward crossovers.

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Here's an interesting note on learning from lessons. Since I've been taking lessons at two different ice rinks, and have had two or three instructors at each place. Many of the instructors are teenagers who are good skaters but not very good teachers (at least with adult students - I think their simple "watch me and do this" approach works better with the young kids they mostly teach). Mary and Lori are the senior instructors at Bloomington and St. Louis Park respectively, and they are both much better teachers than the younger ones. But being more experienced, they are also less flexible - they have one set of steps they use for teaching each move and if you don't get it right away their solution is more drill. All of my breakthrough learning tips have come from either one of the teenage teachers or from fellow students.

The sequence of steps I described above came from one of the teenage teachers at St. Louis Park. Mary not only doesn't use that set of exercises, she said she'd "never heard of teaching it that way" and obviously disapproved of that approach. But I just was not getting anywhere using Mary's technique of starting everything with circle exercises, and this worked like magic.

So the moral is - it's good to have more than one teacher.