olivermoss | (no subject)

Random, but with thinking so much about hockey, I keep remembering this:

I used to do figure skating. My only interaction with ice hockey at all growing up was away teams showing up to the rink and just staring at me, or on very rare occasions starting to enter the ice before my coach chased them off. They were not scheduled to have the ice yet, but the coaches would try to get us to leave anyway and the boys wanted me out of the way. They were very entitled, and very confused why some kid in a pale purple leotard was in the way of important things, like them. The coaches would go on about the poor boys having come all this way in a van and needing to get on the ice already to perform their best that night, but they did not have the ice until four.

I guess all the bluster and entitlement worked at other rinks, but it did not fly at the Dorothy Hamill Skating Rink. They were not actually the main focus and that was very confusing for them. Dorothy Hamill - if that name isn't familiar to you - was a figure skating legend who helped raise the profile of the whole sport in the US. At the time she was a household name, and in the county she was from a bit more than that. I never met her, but the rink's focus was not hockey. It's just where the local high school games where held. It was just very much the wrong place to try to pull that, and in retrospect it's kinda funny.

I was never any good. I was part of a program to make figure skating more of an accessible thing, something people could do like any sport, rather than only done with a competitive focus. I could (sometimes) do the thing where you are skating forward and then you do a thing and land on one foot going backwards. My brain thinks these are called reversals, but googling it that doesn't seem to be the term. That's just what my coach called them. I didn't do it terribly long. When I was selected to be in a showcase showing what the non-competitive 'started too late' kids could do, my parents didn't seem to realize that it was like an actual show. They pulled me one week before the show, which was really shitty because not only was the coaching I got heavily subsidized and nearly free, but I got extra private coaching for the show and the program books had already been printed. My parents just didn't take it seriously when I said I was going to be in a show. When they realized I wasn't kidding, suddenly no more skating. Still glad I got a chance to do it. Having access to a program like that was pretty nice. I never followed figure skating after that. I do not know the terms for jumps. I trained for months for a thing I never got to do, and I guess that put me off wanting to watch it.

I'd love to get a chance to skate again, but I'd probably be a mess. The whole no longer having a sense of balance might be an issue even just for going around in circles. But hey, my local rink here in Portland is also associated with a famous figure skater. Tonya Harding was famous for different reasons, tho.

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Oof, that sucks that she didn't realize. Ankle strength can be hard to quantify. It's easy to tell how strong my arms are, but ankles? Still, with gymnastics that's not just ankles and it sucks she couldn't give you the direction you needed.

At the risk of over-explaining skating/skiing, you can stop/turn on ice/snow by pushing momentum into it. With concrete, you have to redirect momentum or push the force into your skates/legs and it's not a stable force, it's unstable so it's like a vibration. You can't control the turns as much and you can't stop on a dime. I hate it, it feels so unnatural. Also, on ice you can punch through bump with strength or speed, but on a road if there's a stick in the road you have to bunny hop over it. There are three things we call skating, but the control, body impact, etc are all very different. Roller skating is very clunky to me, and roller blading gives me a visceral sense of wrongness. Both can look fun and roller skating has the whole retro thing, and they are very much not my scene.

I remember the teacher saying at one point "since you're all gymnasts, none of you should have trouble with the arm strength required for this..." but like... the class was a general class. Yes, some of the people in the class were on the gymnastics team, because getting class credit for basically an extra practice session and an easy A appealed, but the class was supposed to be open to complete beginners. It only struck me much later that the instructor should have known what to do with a complete beginner, and that part of that "beginner"ness was that I had noodle arms.

Ah, I can see what you mean in terms of the difference of blade to ice vs. wheel to concrete and how it works. (Building up momentum to help push through things like uneven patches also explains both the times I succeeded in at least moving forward vs. the times I was stuck shuffling in place.)

Oof, sounds like a teacher who was told their class had to be for more of a skill range, but they really didn't have the skill or interest to deal with beginners. Seeing where everyone was even at should have been the first thing.

Yeah, speed helps with balance, stability and smoothness. But speed is a lot easier in a rink with this walls you can go and grab

Yeah, that seems likely, in retrospect. It didn't really occur to me until much later that lacking the physical strength to do the moves wasn't something I could fix by just "trying harder." It would have been more useful to get some information about how to build up the muscle groups we were supposed to be using! (Or maybe I should have just taken the strength training class.)

Lol, very much so! Skating in a rink, at least I could give myself a push off the railing when I got stuck. On the lake... fortunately I had people willing to come rescue me, haha.

Yeah, building strength is a whole process and if you don't know the basics of reps and rest days then it's a whole lot of effort that goes nowhere. Though, what I think I know might be out of date.

I feel like taking a strength-training class for my high school gym credit, even though that sounded like the LAST thing I wanted to do, would have served me much better!

It seems like there's a lot of stuff that people in general don't know about the ways to build up physical stuff. I certainly don't have a great idea, beyond realizing that "ah yes, everyone else ever was right, and now that I'm in my mid-30s, I realize I should probably care about my physical shape at least a little." I've saved a couple very basic workout routines... somewhere. I need to dig into my bookmarked stuff and look into them again.

Unfortunately, I think having a poor understanding leads to a ton of frustration - like you said, a whole lot of effort that goes nowhere, and then feels like a waste - and ends up turning people off of further attempts. Or at least that's been my personal experience!