Skating Fridays

First Competition Since 2020

Today is my birthday! I thought it would be fun to celebrate the day by telling you about the competition I skated in a few weeks ago (yes, I am a bit late, but if you follow me on Facebook, then you would know how I fared).

As I mentioned last week, my axels completely disappeared the week before the competition. I’m not sure why my brain (and body) choose not to cooperate when this jump is incorporated into my program. I can land it almost 100% of the time when it’s not choreographed to music.

Anyway, I signed up for practice ice that ended 20 minutes before my official warmup. I figured it would be a good time to get acclimated to the layout of the arena, know where to exit my spins and “feel” the ice. My practice went fairly well.

I was the 4th skater out of 5 and did not watch the skaters ahead of me. Surprisingly, this is probably the least nervous I have ever been for a competition.

Unfortunately, a few bad things happened during my skate:

• Neither of my axels decided to show up (that’s a loss of 2.21 points right there)
• Both of my toe loops got downgraded and did not count (that’s a loss of another 1 point)
• I did not achieve the spin levels I had planned for (I had a CCoSp3 but it was only called a CCoSp1, my SSp3 got called a SSp2 and my CSp2 was called a CSpB). That’s a loss of a few points just in spins.
• My single salchow got called a Waltz Jump (NO idea how this happened – it’s baffling my coaches)

Despite all of these issues, I still managed to score 27.32, which is close to my personal best. My program component score was higher than I normally earn. As an added bonus, I even got a 4 (!!!) in Performance from one judge (I typically score in the high 2s and lower 3s).

This score was enough to earn me the gold medal!

Even though I hadn’t competed since March 2020, I still scored fairly high (for me). This tells me that when I skate a clean program, I should be able to score in the 30s (which is my long-term goal). I know I have the ability to do this – I just need to clear my mind and let my body do what it’s been trained to do.

Regardless, I am ecstatic about having a good baseline for this season and will continue to work at making improvements for my program.