Toepicky Things

My coach has two obsessions: mohawks and toepicky things.

What are 'toepicky things'? Side toe hops, mazurkas, and  toepicking  as a 'cute little element' after three turns, back crosses, etc.

From the perspective of a coach of a slow, timid, not very accomplished skater (moi!) toepicky things are a nice way to add variety to skating and to get the skater over her timidity. If you can toepick in, you can do anything.

During yesterday's lesson she said, "Toepicking is a nice little technique to use to to step through a waltz jump to add variety to a program."

"I can do that already," I said. So I did my usual waltz jump step through on my toe picks, and ended with a side toe hop.

My coach has seen me do these before but like every other coach I have ever had, they never remember diddly after a couple of weeks.

So now she says happily, "Oh, you can do a complete turn on your toepick. That's hard."

I wish she hadn't told me that, because now I can't do them anymore.

So immediately, she wants me to do a step through waltz jump, followed by a back cross, with two toepick half turns and one 360 degree turn on a toepick.

My expression while she demonstrates waltz jump, back cross, then
more toepicking that is good for me.

Then after we work on that for a while she wants me to work on mohawk crosses, which go backwards while you're skating forwards.  I SWEAR THEY VIOLATE THE FUNDAMENTAL LAWS OF THE UNIVERSE! (In particular parity in quantum mechanics).

Mohawk                      Mohawk with back cross