Forward Outside Edges

 Oh, man, remember learning things by reading? Brutal. 

I am loving not understanding anything in figure skating. It's a special phase when every part of a new discipline is mysterious and unattainable. Every session, more things click. The experiential opposite of trying to improve when you are as good as you can be. What will yield the next improvement? More protein? No. MORE protein? No. More sleep? Cross training? Visualization? No, no, no, although now you have an overuse injury. As a beginner, everything is improvement, a landslide of improvement. 

So with that established, I got my backward crossovers today, on both sides, for the first time in my life. I learned a new edge to push from in forwards crossovers. I fell for the first time this decade and nothing bad happened which is a milestone of sorts. An onslaught of improvements. And we worked on 3 turns. This is something I haven't really been able to practice on my own because I don't get where the movement comes from. I have been trying- I know a 3- but have no way of knowing what to move. So I just had to wait for the topic to come up in class, which it did today. My instructor set me to holding an outside edge in a small circle. This was mind blowing. Again, I love being a beginner. I have held an outside edge for almost half a circle but a circle is a whole new experience. So I have that edge to work on, really plenty to work on, but decided to look up 3 turns while class was fresh in my mind in hopes that it would all coalesce. 

Oh, another new development this week- you don't have to put your free foot down to use it to get momentum. You can just swing it around any kind of way and this generates movement across the ice. I think this will help me gloss over parts I don't understand instead of freezing on the spot. Then hopefully understanding can flow into the gaps later.