One Foot transitions...Do it!

The good thing is that I went to Cologne, the land of the beautiful sitting tricks, and I would have been screwed if I had no sitting tricks. Luckily, I have been practicing them like mad and I did a whole line of Christie in the 120's. I'm still  not sure I'll be happy with it when I see the video, but whatever. Lord knows  constructive criticism has its time and place, but it's not this moment.

I also did 6 sevens for a final trick in the women's final, so that was pretty cool too. After that everybody came up asking me how they can practice sevens, and I felt very proud to be able to show them the exercise, which I learned from Yu Jin Seong in San Francisco in June. Thanks, buddy! :)

The semester at my university program is wrapping up and I have lots of reading to do and a decent amount of assignments to finish, so I've been a bit quiet here. Also, Dutch class takes up a significant portion of my day, every day, Monday through Friday. No wonder I can speak it. Employment? Yes I can!

In slalom this past week, I trained all my weaknesses. It feels really good to take something that you're really no good at, that you avoid doing whenever possible, and turn it into one of the best, prettiest things you can do. I highly recommend it. Not only is it fabulous for your skating in general, but it will make you feel amazing.  :)

One simple exercise I find particularly dreamy is training all my one-foots and front/back, back/front transitions through the cones. It's so simple but it looks soooo cool, as well as the fact that it's not as easy to do as it looks. (For the record, I stole the sequence from the Apache 2.1 video.) Training these one-foots and transitions will make you such a better skater. You'll move faster and more confidently in your freestyle, and you will be adding quick, simple transitions to your freestyle repertoire. Take a stab at it, won't you? 

I like starting with forwards one foot on my left leg, transition into back one foot on my right leg, then switching to backwards one foot on the left leg, and finally stepping into forwards one foot on my right leg. That's just one example, though, try any combination of the four one-foots that you like, preferably ones you've never tried before. I try to do five cones of each so it will all work out at the end of the line of cones, but it's more important that you get comfortable transitioning into/out of and slaloming in a foot/direction that you're not as used to, so feel free to hang tight and keep going down the line of cones on the leg you don't feel fantastic at. At the end of the line you're just going to turn around and go right back into it, so it's not like you're wasting cones.

When you're doing this you might find that you need to figure out how and when to change where you are looking as you're slaloming, but if you take it slowly, you should be able to get the timing of the head switches correct as you change to glance over the other shoulder. Remember, don't you dare ever look down in front of you as you are skating backwards through the cones. This will ruin you. You will never get better this way. So just, please, don't do it, even though it might feel easier as you're learning backwards skating. I can't tell you how many people I have seen looking down between their legs in front of them as they try to slalom backwards through the cones, and the moment they change to looking over their shoulder and opening their hip up to be in line with the cones, their skating improves dramatically and *gasp,* they start to actually look cool.

If you are having trouble with this and would like to simultaneously punish yourself for your inadequacies and learn how to correct them, please refer to my long-winded opus on skating backwards, which can be found here. For further disparagement and advice, feel free to be in touch with me. :)

I am curious, if anyone is actually reading this (because I've been too chicken to advertise thus far), does anyone else have a favorite Basics sequence that they like to practice? If so, feel free to tell us about it in a comment here. You see, that's the sort of interactive question that makes this appear to be a discussion format, when really I just want to steal your exercises so I can continue to improve my own skating. :)

All sarcasm aside, I really would like to steal your favorite practice sequences for my own benefit, but I am also curious as to what people enjoy doing when they're just noodling around with the intention of skating better. After all, that's the kind of slalom that tends to feel the greatest.

COMING UP:

The technical: I realized somewhere along the way that I don't really suck at spinning. Actually, I think it was about a year ago when I wrote Naomi an email full of feverish ideas. This is the sort of thing that happens when you think about skating 90% of the day. (Unfortunately I'm thinking about it slightly less with school, but I hope to return to that figure shortly.) So I'm going to try to help you spin. We'll see how I do; it's going to take some thinking and experimenting on helpless dizzy slalomers, but it's definitely on the list.

The philosophical: Something that comes up from time to time is that I skate by feel. I don't look at a ton of video of myself (I have to force myself to do that), and often I don't come up with combos based on how they look, but how they feel to do. It's a big part of why I love to spin. I'm not sure how much I will have to say about this topic, but it's interesting.

Non-skating: I'm just going to wing that. Even the things that are non-skate related seem to relate back to skating in some lovely metaphorical way.

As always, thanks for reading, and see you at my Belgium workshop in February!

xoxoxo

meg