Iced In

I skated this morning solo, and it was pretty lousy after a few weeks off the ice and with dull blades to boot. Yeah yeah, excuses, excuses. Plus all of the off-ice training I'm doing (elliptical, weights, yoga) to help my hips has done a number on my body - it's in transition right now and frequently cries out in protest.

I think I'm developing some of the dormant muscles that have atrophied in recent years because of my hip issues, because I'm able to focus directly on my weak spots thanks to our new basement workout room. This is good in the long run, but right now it's pretty painful. I am also working on the upper body, the better to wrestle those crutches next summer.

Perry bought an elliptical trainer and "Inspire" weight machine for himself, but I've been using them quite a bit lately too. Plus I've been doing the Power Yoga with Rodney Yee DVD (I highly recommend it). I've been getting buff in anticipation of the debuffing that will occur when I have surgery in 6 months or so. The more buff I am before, the easier it will be to tolerate the debuffing and recover, or so the theory goes. And based on blogs I've read, the hip chicks who start off in better shape seem to recover faster once on the other side of the knife.

But back to skating ... today I was mostly sore from the extra off-ice workouts and out of practice from not being on the ice, so it was pretty much a lost cause on the ice. Tim is back from vacation Friday so I hope to get another session in before that on my own. Then we need to get busy on the final leg of this competition season. I am looking forward to it.

Iced Out

OK, I'm running out of "Tim-approved" TnT pics, so here's a T pic!

I haven't written much here lately. Tim and I practiced on Tuesday (and a very nice practice it was, as we fixed a whole bunch of places in our free dance that had been bothering us). Meanwhile the weather has been getting worse and worse. Today Perry and I were iced in and spent the day going stir crazy in the house. Tomorrow, with everything iced over, we'll probably do the same. Who knows how this week will go weather-wise? Crappy weather is expected through the holidays. Since we live at 600 feet elevation, at the top of a hill, we always get the worst of the weather.

Somehow we're down to 4 months until adult nationals, work is light, and I can't get to the rink to practice. This would have been a great week to run through things and continue our momentum, but it looks like we won't be skating much, if at all. I am getting a bit antsy about this. Not much more to say!

Run through

It was tough to get up this morning after a nice 4-day holiday spent doing a lot of nothing. No hip exercises, no stretching, and no skating. But up I got and went to practice where, miraculously, we did an entire free dance run through with lifts. All 5 elements were completed, we had no falls, we were skating fast (although in the small rink we can't really push it out), and we hit most of the musical highlights.

That's not to say it was perfect. We still have unison issues and moves that don't work right all the time, we aren't always skating to the music, and we are in the "hey this is new for us" stage and so not relating to each other very well yet. This is exactly where we should be at this point in the season.

I look back to the 2006/7 season when we had an earlier start but did our own choreography; our goal was to skate in the mid-December holiday shows, which we did. Even though we aren't skating the shows this year since I'll be in Lake Placid, I think if we had to, we could do a reasonable performance in two weeks. It would be rough, but it was rough two years ago when we did it. I think we're on track for the season with 4 and a half months to go.

Now we better kick ourselves in the butt and get working on our compulsory dances!