Skating Fridays

Competition Recap – Part 1

Wow, what a weekend! I competed at an all-adult competition on Saturday and lived to tell the tale! All kidding aside, I had a good skating weekend.

My first event was my individual freestyle event. There were 7 skaters registered for my event, but one withdrew. One of the skaters in my event was our 2021 National Champion, so I was just hoping to skate clean. I had rehearsed the program countless times in my mind before arriving at the rink. Imagine my surprise when I got to the rink and saw that the judges were sitting on the complete other side of the rink! My mental preparation went down the drain and I had to re-acclimate myself to the rink by flipping my perspective by 180 degrees.

Thankfully, I had practice ice so I could lay out my choreography and get my bearings. I had a good practice and landed all my jumps, and my spins felt good.

I wasn’t nervous when they called my name and instead felt a sense of calm. The next 2 minutes and 40 seconds flew by very quickly. I got my leg tangled in my final spin and therefore messed it up. Otherwise, I earned a personal best score and earned the silver medal in my age group! Also, one skater told me that of all the women in the Gold freestyle event (about 10 total skaters), I earned the second highest score! Wow! Talk about a confidence booster!

This was also the first time since 2018 that I landed both axels and received credit for them. HUGE win.

Later that evening, my skating besties and I performed a trio in the ‘Don’t Go It Alone’ event. We skated against 3 other very talented teams. They didn’t post the scores or the final results, so nobody knew what happened afterwards. We were all summoned to the medal podium and the announcer just called out who won what medal. We silently cheered when we heard the name of the 4th place medalists. “Ok, we beat one team.” Then they called the bronze medalists, and it wasn’t us! They named the silver medalists, and again, it wasn’t us. Which meant… that we won the Gold! Holy cannoli!!

Although it was a long day, I was thrilled to have done so well. I have been working on my mental game and was pleased to see it come through in a big way.

I’ll recap more on my freestyle event next week.

 

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