At the 5 month mark...

Skaters are SUPPOSED to fall down a lot. Here I've been trying so hard not to make a fool of myself (and failing miserably) and congratulating myself that I don't fall down terribly often.

Then I watched a 15 year old girl work on a double something-or-other on Thursday morning.

She must have spent nearly an hour. Over and over again, build up speed, flip backwards, spot, launch, turn once, then twice, then touch a toe back to the ice, miss the landing, and collapse in a heap. Often, in what looked like pain - the pain of falling definitely, but also the pain of frustration.

At yet she got up, brushed the ice shavings off her legs, went back to the other side of the rink, and started it all over again.

That's when I suddenly realized that falling was part of the process - falling a LOT. If you aren't willing to fall, you won't take the risks you need in order to improve.

Duh. Old people are so slow sometimes. :)

It did change the way I approach things. I started being willing to throw myself off-balance to get a position right, take a risk of leaning just a little farther than I wanted to, or throw myself into a new skill and not worry so much about doing it wrong and falling down.

If the 15-year-old could do that much, then so could I. I had some spectacular blow-outs that were worthy of "Wide World of Sports" trailers, but it did change my attitude.

It seemed to help. Will has been starting to focus on the nuances of placement and alignment, and often times that means being willing to off-balance myself in order to find the correct balance point, not just the first one I found. Anna is doing the same thing, and although I tease Will by calling her "The Micrometer Lady", I don't feel so much the fool when she does it now. Yes, I'm going to fall, and yes, it's going to hurt my ego and my ass sometimes. But if you aren't willing to risk a little, you might as well park your butt on the couch and eat potato chips in front of the TV.

Once again, work got completely in the way of skating - and that's starting to piss me off. I only got to the rink three times this week. I did spend nearly an hour on Tuesday just practicing the backwards edge control exercises - Will always remarks on my ability to do the same damn thing over and over again until I get it. It's just stubbornness - pure, naked stubbornness. Ballet teaches you that. I think it's one of the reasons that ballet dancers are such complete assholes. I got the outside edge version pretty much down now, but the inside edge version escaped me until my lesson on Friday, when Will broke it down for me again.

The other big thing he has me doing now is connecting things together into patterns and working on my body placement and eye line. I spend WAY too much time starting at the ice, and eventually it makes me hunch over and lean forward. Probably half of my lesson this week was all about "STOP LOOKING AT THE ICE". :) It's funny to me, since I used to yell that at my dance students all the time... "the floor isn't going anywhere, I promise!"

I think this week I actually started feeling like an actual, real-life skater. It's taken 5 months, but I can remember now some of the basic stuff that seemed so hard (hell, just STOPPING terrified me) comes completely naturally now, and I seem to be settling into a rhythm. When I started (and realized how flippin' hard this was going to be), I could hardly imagine myself actually doing this without feeling awkward - but it's slowly settling into my body and every once in a while, the stars align and DAMN I'm actually a skater!

That's pretty cool.