When Your Coach Has an "Evil Plan"

For the last few weeks, my coach, Miss Bianca has been refining my mohawks in a pattern. Crossover, crossover, stroke, mohawk, turn forward.

I practiced it faithfully

So today I demonstrated that I can Nail It!

Miss Bianca nods, "Now, I want you to do mohawk straight from the crossover. So it's crossover, hold the inside edge, go directly into the mohawk."

This is a bit wonkier. I relied on that intermediary stroke between the crossover and the mohawk to get my upper body aligned; But after a few tries, it's ..... okay.

It took some adjustment, and caused some tension.

"That will do for now. Next we're going to do back edge of the mohawk, then go step behind, step over, turn forward. And we'll merge the two."

I give her a long slow stare.

I now see her evil plan. All these weeks she's been planning to introduce me to the 8 step mohawk. No, not the one on Silver moves, the one at the end of Basic 8. Crossover, crossover, mohawk, cross behind going backwards, cross forward going backwards, turn forward, repeat. And strangely, there's only 6 steps in there, so why it's called '8 step', no idea. Maybe they count the tiny back stroke between the cross behind and cross forward, and an introductory step.

When I passed Basic 8 many years ago, the test was crossover, crossover, mohawk, back cross, back cross, turn forward.

"So why did they add the step behind, step over going backwards?" I ask, "Was it to get people ready for back cross rolls?"

Then, I swear,  I see a twinkle in her eye. Miss Bianca has more Evil Plans, buried deep inside her Evil Plan!

The Awkward Stage

My rink runs adult LTS like a social club. We've got Basic Skills and Freeskate. That's it. No Basic skills 1-8....just one Basic Skills class. Same with freeskate. Just one big class. Some people have been in their happy place for years. So yes, social club on ice.

I'm in the awkward stage -- too good for Basic and not quite really good enough for Freeskate.

Whatever. The skating director put me in freeskate so there I am.

We warm up with spirals on each leg across the rink. Let me assure you, my faithful readers, that I can indeed do something that resembles a spiral, if the spiral would accept an acute angle of the leg instead of a horizontal angle of the leg.

Then Dance Coach says, "Now we do double three entrance into a jump."

That's not happening!

So, I go happily off to my space away from all the people who are willing to do whatever the coach says, and I work on whatever I want. Occasionally Dance Coach passes by me and says "Open your arms!" which is one of those coach instructions that skaters can't interpret because it doesn't mean 'spread your arms wider': it means something else that has to do with my shoulders or my elbows or my head position, but which no one can explain. Ladies and gentlemen consider that your lesson in enumeratio for the day. 

On the other hand, at the end of class, I nailed the waltz jump followed by side toe hops. Not sayin' it was pretty, but damn, I nailed that sucker.

Back three....

Still, crappy waltz jump with side toe hops, is better than nothing at all!

Me and My Coach Working on Back Threes

My Coach

Me