Turnout

Briefly- in dance you hold your body in different shapes, for safety, power, beauty. One is called turn out, and it is both fundamental and I think lifelong. The idea is, while standing upright, your hips would turn so far from the center line of your body as to make a straight, 180 degree line from your left toes through your left heel through your right heel to your right toes. 

This is a line I essentially have never seen myself make. Somehow I carry on, and live a rich, full life. In ballet class I just do something different. But on the ice... they told us to do it so I am trying. I am too new to know if there is a workaround. 

 

I’ve been working on my turnout. I check it at home standing on a rug that has a floral design laid out 8 points. I go from a scant 90 degrees before stretching, to similar to what you see above. I don't know if other people with this turnout self select out of these disciplines, or what, but this is a bit of an outlier in the direction of bad. What you also can't see is that I am using friction from the ground to hold this position, and once I raise a foot in the air on the ice my toe swivels in. 

However! I think I was only using turn out in class because other, more intermediate students were working on it, and I have much to work on before I get there properly myself. 

I did not need my wrist guards today at Coffee Club. From what I can see, the ethos at Snoopy's Home Ice is conservative for adults. We are really drilling the fundamentals so there is very little opportunity to fall down. Our coach even joked that falling out of an outside edge is "a hard fall" (so don't) which is the opposite of what they tell us in Oakland which is to fall forward only and never backward. I literally love that there is a life stage where you just hang out at the rink with your friends for thirty years after your kids are grown, I love to see seniors like glowing with vitality and following their dreams. And, I am learning that they have a different relationship to their knees, hips, and feet than I do, with different considerations. 

Okay there were millions of places to stretch my hips but they were kind of too nice. Like the barrier plexiglass was pristine, I can't put my skate on that. I ended up in like the saddest unintentionally weighted (from the skates) pigeon pose on a carpeted bench. Then class started but I didn't realize so I just used the totally empty outside of the rink to do very ill advised ballet barre leg swings in skates (ill advised because of the momentum and the blade. They felt great.) until my eyes focussed through the barrier and I saw classes forming and I hustled onto the ice. 

I guess I also just feel at home in Oakland in general so I can just pop my foot up wherever. I do avoid purpose built handrails out of courtesy but I will use a balustrade bar that could double as a handrail. 

Mermaiding Eureka Slough

 

I got my mermaid costume optimized for water- minimal ornaments plus hair twisted and stitched and steamed in place. This is my first year having a foam head and it has made a huge difference in how easy it is to work on the wig. 

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Set off on my drive to meet the team. At the last second I realized none of my dark colored makeup had been extensively water tested except my mascara. So I had to draw my eyeliner on with mascara. I think it looks pretty good and especially since the alternative was letting it run down my face. 

The tail is ready, the fin is ready, the chihuahua is resigned. 

I didn't take any photos because I wanted to stay in character. But I made my way through such mud, swam out amongst the kayakers (who were delighted), watched a few teams splash down, and made my way back to shore. I had selected the side of the ramp behind the judges as being fairly private to transform back from a mermaid. And it was. It probably had five or ten percent as many spectators as the rest of the park. However, this was about 75 people. So I wasn't able to crawl out of the mud like I could if I were alone, and had to let my feet sink in up to my thighs, when they would finally meet a rock, and I could stand on the rock to take another step. It was the most dignity available to me in the moment. 

I did think perhaps I would skim over the rocks in my shoes, but that was quickly ruled out by the shoes themselves. 

Whenever I'm on vacation I always think, I could live here. I don't know why but this breezeway really spoke to me so I have preserved it here for memory's sake. 

Redwoods Roadtrip

 

One wonderful thing about the Kinetic Grand Championship in Humboldt is the drive through the redwoods to get there. This is cathedral level awe inspiring nature.

However this year it just seemed regular. Like a regional park versus a national park. Trying to figure out the reason I think it’s because we had the wettest spring in ten years at home. So, instead of the first outdoor moisture of my life being a balm to my soal…

It was just regular nice. I will also mention anywhere wet is so exotic to me, Wales, Tacoma, all of it. And dry places like we have at home kind of stress me out the whole time. Where is the water? 

Driving my hardest to get through wine country. 

2023 Kinetic Grand Championship

 

Awards night at Ferndale County Fairgrounds. 

I’m constitutionally not competitive so my team winning is not better than another team winning, and is a little worse because we just won last year. At key moments I proposed my idea of not competing to win, but was entirely overruled. However, it does mean we are on the splash page for the website which makes us easy to find and show off. 

The perpetual trophy which we carted up 200 miles from my family’s house, got awarded it, and carted it back. 

Adult Ice Skating Levels (or not)

I think I found out that jumps are coming up in just a second. Like after I get the hang of everything we've worked on, get them clean and consistent, the next batch of things involves little jumps. This conflicts with my plan to never do a jump for any reason. I read that you get a pin for completing a level. I am pretty sure we all are not getting pins in real life. Otherwise I would be seeing them on skate bags, on skaters, on the ground. But I did think, what pin am I theoretically working on? Because, I love goals. 

If I were earning a pin I would earn the Beta pin. That's the highest level where everything is coming along nicely. I just got my back crossovers although I haven't had empty enough ice to work on consecutive ones. 

However, Adult Intermediate has had us work on almost every skill from Pre Alpha to Delta. And we still have two more weeks together. So it seems like not very many more sessions before those are all under control. Actually they did make us do one little jump called the Bunny Hop. It seems like a misnomer for an Adult skill. I guess if 190 pounds of bunny hit the ice it would look like the Bunny Hop feels. Which is: dread, nausea, adrenaline. I read that adrenaline is to get you out of the situation that gave you adrenaline. And the funny thing about that is a wave of renewed vigor and energy comes over me, and I am kind of mad, and I still literally do not know how to do the skill.

I suppose these new tricky things might take longer than the old tricky things. I see my ice skates were delivered 2 months ago almost to the day. 

The best hike in Oakland

 

Woodminster Cascade is really a jewel. It's a set of stone stairs winding up both sides of a series of pools. The pools are not running. I'm sure there's tons of meetings about getting them fixed. The volunteers who work on the gardening do an incredible job. On a wet day this feels like Wales. But it's right here at home. 

Bear and I start at the top of the cascade. Instead of the summit, the highest pool is our starting point. We do this by parking at the top at the small dog park and walking over. We started doing this so I could minimize the stairs he goes down. He is one foot tall so he takes them like a rocking horse. With the current out of control foxtail season, I like that I can stop our Cascade hike before we reach the open, grassy areas. 

The trail is part of City of Oakland parks but maintained at least in part by volunteers. City of Oakland parks have a more tranquil, courtyard like feel. That said, it is not unusual to spot people's living space, food stores, or what I think are ritual items. I have never had a confrontation and my policy is that I don't pick up the things like I normally would. The things might not even be unattended-they often look freshly set down-but just the person is out of sight to avoid me. 

I won't say everything you can see and find to leave some discovery up to the reader. 

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. 

Public Skate

 I'm so glad we have somewhere cold to work out. I just watched this Nike as underdog movie where they keep referring to running and I kept thinking, oh, if I liked running I could get so much exercise for free and right outside my front door. Instead I get 2 hours of ice time for $14 plus driving across town and paying for parking. I still don't actually need 2 hours to get a workout done. The limiting factor has been foot pain in my ice skates. When I started up lessons my feet cramped up within ten minutes and just stayed cramped. It got way better to the point that I can stay for all of an hour long class. Then I missed class over memorial day weekend and the pain came back the following week. So, I think I have to skate one or two times per week to keep my feet used to it. I don't know why that would be but it's a nice built in reinforcement for going to the rink for a practice session in between classes. That said, today was the first day I ever skated for over an hour. There's a sweet spot in the 3pm-5pm weekday public skate where school is out (so no one is on a field trip with their entire grade on rental skates, alternately clinging to the wall or laying on the ice) but no one has had time to commute from school to the rink. In a perfect world I would get to the rink at 2:30, warm up in the bleachers, skate my most developing moves, then by 3:30 as the rink fills up do easier things for conditioning. I can't believe Spring session of Learn to Skate is over in one month. It has been a wonderful way to jump start the weekend. I've been thinking I have months and months before I would need to add private lessons in order to progress. However once we focus on something in LTS we don't do that same skill intensively again. So when I was introduced to 3 turns nothing came of it, I have been studying and practicing on my own, and now it feels like something is happening but it would be great to have someone knowledgeable take a look. I skate a little half circle on my inside edge, check my arms, lift up onto my rocker to turn around, and currently I heavily set my free leg anywhere to keep from falling over. 

Ice Skating Edges

 I found my "edges" for the first time today!!! 

I know what edges are from trying to understand synchro and figure scoring on tv. What they are in person is way better. It was like magic. It was like a dream. I just thought what I wanted and then, without knowing how, it was happening. You can tell it is working because of the direction you travel. Inside edges give a comfortable swoop toward your center and outside edges give an exhilarating swoop away from yourself.