Freestyle frenzy

I've always gone to the weekday morning freestyles. Even when it was summer and the kids were out of school, it was never packed-to-craziness. This past week my coach had jury duty, so my lesson got moved to the freestyle session this Sunday noon. Oh my. I felt like a girl from the countryside stuck in the middle of a busy NY intersection with no traffic lights. Apparently, it was even more crowded than usual because sectionals are coming up.

My lesson was scheduled for the second half of the one-hour session, and I think I spent half of the 30 minutes before my lesson waiting for people to pass so I can practice something. Then I spent another half of that aborting whatever I had started to practice because someone was charging over. There must have been some sort of order within all this madness because all the other twenty skaters managed to do their thing at top speed. But being a lowly adult skater, I could not comprehend the order. Most of them were teenage girls who were skating so fast I felt like a red target in front of a charging bull. Another few of them were little girls who were still fast but off my radar because they are below my line of vision until they come close enough. Too close.

Scariest of all was a pairs team. They took up three times the size of a single skater, so instead of a charging bull, they more resembled a derailed train to me. It was really interesting though, because I've never seen a pairs team in person. They were two teenage kids who would immediately let go of each other when they were done and coaches were talking, and they barely looked at each other. I wonder how they handle the teenage awkwardness of having to touch each other! And I really wonder who manages to get teens into doing pairs or ice dancing in the first place. The teens themselves certainly don't look like they want to be in such close proximity with the opposite gender. In fact, I just watched an interview on Youtube a few days ago of how Tessa Virtue and Scott Moir (2010 Olympic ice dance gold medalists who've danced together for 15 years since Tessa was 7 years old) did not speak to each other for the first year of skating together. So I'm guessing it's not the teens' own idea that they want to do pairs/ice dancing. So do their coaches decide that for them?

Finally it was time for my lesson, and even with coach J's promises of "I got you covered", I was still constantly in fear of my surroundings. She was quite exasperated. But hey! I managed to do nice crossover patterns and spins. I failed miserably on my multiple tries of toe loop jumps though. I don't know what got into me, these are my most stable jumps and I hardly ever not land them. Most likely it was because coach was watching me, because for the few seconds that she turned her head to talk to someone and I thought she wasn't watching, I did a perfect toe loop. (She did see it though.) Well, good to know that I can do a toe loop. Now all I need for the test is to ask the judges to kindly look the other way when I do it.

My conclusion for the day was that a packed freestyle session is worse than a packed public session. On public, at least I can stake out a small area in the centre (the more packed it is, the tinier this area becomes), every one skates in a CCW direction, and people are relatively slow. On a packed freestyle, it's all whichever-way at whatever-speed at whoever-knows-when. I could barely even survive in the corner, because that's probably the lutz corner...

I am so looking forward to my usual calmness of weekday morning freestyle!