Trick or Treat
Happy Halloween! Do you have any fun plans for tonight? We plan on taking Addie trick or treating in our old neighborhood and at our new one. I could tell you about our upcoming weekend, but since this is a Skating Fridays post, I’ll change the subject to keep this skating-related.
It seems that my body is playing a mean trick on me this week. I skated every day this week (except Sunday), and my axel was nowhere to be found. I could barely do a waltz jump, much less try to rotate in the air. Every attempt was so horrendous that I could have turned this experience into a skating horror movie. It was extremely frustrating and de-motivating. I told my coach that it wasn’t a good jumping week, and she said that she’d observe some jumps to figure out my issue.
I finally decided to wisen up and videotaped my axel attempts. Once I had it captured on my camera, I went back to see what was causing me to mess up this jump. The culprit? My arms. I could see that my arms would swing through on the takeoff, but once I hit my toe pick and began the rotation, my arms would open up and get all crazy. Well, at least now I knew what was wrong.
Then last night in group class, I tried a few axels. The first few were bad, as expected. But then I thought long and hard about pulling my arms in close and very tightly. And you know what? I landed it! My coach was spying on me (she was teaching the class next to ours) and cheered. Then she asked me to do it again, and the nerves got to me so I fell pretty hard. Ouch.
When she wasn’t looking, I landed another good axel. My skating friends said that they could not hear my landing, so that means I was doing them correctly.
I’m hoping that this cruel slump goes by quickly and that I’m back to consistently landing my jumps again. It would be a real treat, especially since my birthday is next week. I want my jump back!
