I Survived HIgh Power (and adult beginner ballet)!

I had my first round of classes last week - adult beginner ballet on Thursday night and high power (yes with the kids) on Friday morning.

The ballet class is going to be excellent. It's me and one other adult that I met in the adult ice show number. She's really nice, and we seem to be picking things up at about the same pace. Coach K is also the instructor for this class, and she's willing to start class 15 min earlier so we can have a 45 min class even though it's only scheduled for an hour. Coach K is so nice! For our first class, we did plies and tendus, a couple of short sequences incorporating both, and a few jumps. We only did a half hour, and I didn't feel like I was working very hard, but I sure was sore in the shins and ankles the next morning. This thrills me as I always need to work on ankle strength.

Friday morning was power class, and I was terrified. Some of the kids in this class are really good. Not just the best at the rink kind of good, but really and truly good. One of them lands double axels and the occasional triple, and two other girls are working on double axel and a few triples. Luckily, high power during the school year is freestyle five and up, so there are a few ankle biters that just got their axels, so I'm not the slowest one there. The rink's skating director is also the lead instructor for the power class, and she scares me. She's usually very nice, but if someone isn't performing to her expectations, she'll have a fit like you've never seen. If she ever had a fit like that at me, I think I'd just curl up and cry. But, she seems to save those fits for her private students, thank goodness. We did some very hard things in the class, but it wasn't as exhausting as I expected. In the past, the power classes I've taken have just involved skating around really fast for 30 min at a time. In this class, we're doing footwork patterns that will help us learn to generate more speed and power from precise edging.

We did an inside 3turn pattern that I mangled horribly my first time down the ice. The return trip was quite nice though, and the skating director even complimented me on it :)

Then we did outside edge cross strokes, forward and backward. These were a little tough for me because this rink teaches deeper edges and longer holds than I'm used to. And, the whole class is supposed to watch each other and stay in sync while doing cross strokes. I'm not very good at matching other people's timing.

The next pattern was alternating inside edges, forward and backward. These were tricky because we were supposed to keep looking over our shoulder while staying on a really deep edge.

Then, we did back cross cuts (alternating back edges, but you change from edge to edge by crossing your foot in front). I sucked massively at these. I made it about halfway down the rink before pretty much grinding to a halt. After that, it was Chris' edges which are very deep inside edges with the free leg crossed underneath the skating leg and extended. Very tricky to balance, especially with the arm position - the arm opposite the skating leg is extended up.

Finally, we wound up the class with twizzles and I sucked massively at these also. I guess the skating director thinks twizzles starting on a FI edge should be easy for the high level skaters, so we had to start our twizzles by doing a FO 3turn, doing an edge pull from the BI exit edge to a BO edge and starting the twizzle from the BO edge. Yeah, it's rough.

Now I have lots of things to work on. I'm going to be getting up at 3:40am lots of days this week to make those 5am sessions. I need practice!