Freestyle to the beat

So perhaps it had nothing to do with the delicious Mexican dinner Saturday night, but Sunday was pretty miserable for my tummy. It's too bad. Well, the shrimp TASTED fine and I had a nice time in the restaurant with everybody, so ah well.

The skating was fun too! Tim was playing a bunch of RJD2 and other songs I really like, so I alternated between actual training and then just freestyle with the music. It's been quite awhile since I just enjoyed good music and freestyled a lot. I used to do it a lot more often, but then those evil things called "tricks" crept into my skating and suddenly I found myself "training" instead of "skating." But Saturday I just let it go, for the duration of the playlist at least. Something about chilled-out hip hop just makes me feel so damn good: RJD2, Tribe Called Quest, Diggable Planets, anything like that really makes me want to slalom, and not just any slalom, but very relaxed freestyle, with lots of nelsons and volts and strolls and pivots and extremely bent knees. Tricks? Forget tricks. Ha.

Skating with the music is also something that I have the satisfaction of being able to do with a lot of hip hop, without having to try too hard, either. Maybe KSJ can keep perfectly in time with the beat of a hyper-kinetic Korean pop song, but I'm not at a level where I can do that. I mean, I've never tried. I mean, I wonder...

OK, next time I go out skating I will find the fastest song I can and see if I can skate in time with the music! I will let you know how it goes. :-D

But anyway. It's not exactly easy to skate in time with music, at least, I never found it easy to do, and the more my level comes up, the easier it becomes. When I started slalom, I remember desperately wanting to slalom with the beat and feeling that my legs just wouldn't go where I wanted them to fast enough, or that they went where I wanted to in time but then they slipped into the next movement too quickly, and that was frustrating. Wheels make control rather difficult. :)

If this is you now, then just keep trying. Trying to keep yourself paced with a beat is very challenging and will have a massively positive effect on your level, and if you can't do it very well yet, then there is nothing wrong with you! In my case I didn't practice skating with a beat as much as I should have, because it was so frustrating to always mess up. Then my level became much higher through other means, and when I came back to skating with the beat, I found it much easier. So either way, you will get better at it as your level rises.

Well, I didn't spend the whole skating session freestyling, as nice as that would have been. In fact, I dedicated one hour and a half, 90 whole minutes, to practicing JUMPING TRICKS! Yeah! By that I primarily mean Jumping X and Wiper, and combinations thereof. If you've ever practiced Jumping X, then you know how exhausting that is! But I found myself with 90 minutes left in the session and I was still simply burning up with energy (don't you remember my post from last Saturday? LOL), so I decided to burn it off with these tricks. To be honest, I didn't think I would make it through 90 minutes of jumping. But I did, and my Jumping X and Wiper are soooo improved! I'm really excited to use them in my runs now. And to be honest, the better you become at these tricks, the less exhausting they are to do, so while I was sweaty and tired at the end, I was no more so than at the end of a regular slalom session.

In the next post I will outline my Jumping Tricks practice session for you, because I think I practice very effectively and I think it could help you structure your own practices, whether for jumping tricks or any other sort of trick.

BUT, my mama is visiting from the States and I've got to go, so it's got to wait until next time!
As always, thanks for reading! :D
xoxoxo
meg