Patience, jackass...

No skating practice since I had my wisdom teeth removed on Thursday afternoon, but I have had a wonderful email exchange with another adult ice dancer and former ballet dancer I met on the Adult Ice Dancers' Yahoo group. Jim's insight into what the transition from barre to ice was like has been a huge help to calm my frustrations about how "slow" this seems to be going for me. It's great to have someone with a very similar background (who's been skating for 15 years!) to help level-set my expectations, and help me process some of the problems I have with my dancer-brain.

Bottom line, yes - it's going to take a while to learn this; yes - you have to unlearn some stuff from dancing; and yes - the impulse is to want to start doing real dance right away! Turns out, when he made the transition, his own dancer-brain also thought "hey, this is going to be easy for me" just as mine did. I'm not alone in discovering that it's not that simple, and it's somehow comforting to know that my experience isn't unique in this respect. :)

Jim is schooling me to regain the infinite patience of the professional dancer - hours at the barre doing the same fundamentals over and over again really pay off when you try to do something worth watching - and it's exactly the same for ice. Exactly. If I don't invest in the work now, odds are anything I try to do later will be uncontrolled and sloppy. I knew that, I know that - I just forget it when I come up against the gap between what I can do right now and what I WANT to be able to do right now.

So the moral of the story is to suck it up, be willing to look bad in front of other people, forget they are there, and concentrate on your own skating. He did encourage me to start doing something to music though - and I think that's what I'm missing. I even lift weights to music, and it's a huge motivator. Will seems to be ready to start teaching me some steps, and maybe I'll start taking my ipod to the rink with me. I've told Will to not be shy about beating the crap out of me during my lessons. No point doing this if I don't go at it full-steam-ahead.

And if that means more time skating circles on one leg and dodging the kiddies, so be it.

Thanks for the great advice and encouragement, Jim!