Thursday, April 12, 2007

A very, very long day


So first, the important part. The initial round is over and we are in second place (!)

We won the starlight waltz, but more important than that, we got 2 first place ordinals on our blues (and ended up third in the dance, although second and third were very close). After struggling all season with the dance and skating it poorly at sectionals, we skated it the best we possibly could. I was so happy with how we skated it that it was easy to smile during the starlight. During the starligh we almost ran into the wall on the first pattern 3 turns - (adrenaline, I think). Other than that it was a great dance. I felt we danced both dances, and that was our goal.

John Dowding told us the difference between Sectionals and now was amazing - we look like a different team. I am so glad we worked with him at Sectionals; without his help I don't think our blues would ever have evolved to this.

Trivia - I did have to borrow Molly's bra due to leaving mine in the hotel room. OK, that was unnecessary information, but why not? It was such a long day I'm surprised we didn't have anything else go wrong. We woke up to snow on the ground, had a practice in the morning, ate lunch, rested at the hotel, had our official warmup, watched the gold dance event, then finally skated our event at 8:45 PM. All in all, a very long day.

The pre-gold dance group is very competitive; the other 5 teams are all very good skaters and all have prior competition experience, so we are thrilled to be sitting in second place going into the final round.

After our event we had trouble finding the Portland group for dinner, mainly because we didn't have GPS (we didn't have the address, just directions). See my blog from yesterday, I am lost without GPS! By the time we got there close to 11 PM Tim was starving and I just wanted dessert.

Tim is happy he never has to do the blues again. Little does he know that it is now my favorite dance and I want to compete it in the Lake Placid open event this summer - NOT!

I am now in the hotel's business center typing this. Kiyomi and Neil (who are in first place in our event) just walked by and burst into laughter. They always see me in here when they walk by. I think they believe I don't have a hotel room but that I'm actually living in the business center! I guess it's time for bed ...


1 comment:

Gordon said...

Congrats on overcoming adversity! Nice picture, too!