finefigure

[finefigure]

The Importance of Being Less Earnest

I’ve taken the last week and a half off of skating, except for lessons.

I hadn’t intended to take time off, but two weekends ago, when I was practicing alongside my students before coaching them, I realized that they were way more excited about skating and devoted to practicing than I was. Granted, they are pretty darn excited about skating and devoted to practicing, but the contrast was stark, because I could barely make myself practice the competition figures. I kept doing a few and then getting off the ice to text a friend or have a bite to eat or just not skate.  It hit me that I’d been practicing the same 15 things, 10-20 hours a week, since mid-October. And that was when I had the revelation that a person can be extremely far from doing a thing well and still be burned out on it, and that I needed a break.

More than that, I realized that I had woken up scared every morning since the figures for Worlds were announced back in October. Every. Single. Morning. I’d been irritable and teary and easily frustrated off and on (but mostly on) for the better part of ten months. No wonder I’d been having a hard time losing weight: I’d been flooding myself with cortisol.

That day, coaching and then just messing around with my students on the ice brought me back around to enjoying skating, and it occurred to me that I didn’t need a complete break from skating per se: I just needed to remember why it was fun.

So I talked to Nancy about it last week, and instead of working on the competition figures, we played around with creative figures and the new figures that are going to be introduced at the WFS workshop this weekend. We laughed a lot. It was so fun, the way we used to be before I was a WFC competitor, when we were still just friends enjoying an activity together. I hadn’t realized how much I’d missed that.

Today I took another lesson. I’ve clearly had all the break my body can handle, because I was pretty annoyingly uncoordinated. We worked on some workshop stuff and some championship stuff, and as we were doing the championship figures, I could feel my frustration rising again.

After the lesson, I said to Nancy, “I don’t know how I can keep my own personality and be OK with doing how I know I’m going to do at Worlds this year. I’m trying really hard to be OK with it, and sometimes I think I am, but mostly I’m just not at all.”

She told me that I have some time to think about it, and that I have the option to compete just some of the figures again this year if I decide that’s best for me. She said that if I do them all, I need to figure out a way to be OK and not a crying mess on the ice at the total mercy of my frustrated perfectionism, because the whole point is to take joy in figures and encourage other people to as well. All of which is totally true.

She also said that she’s proud of me and will be no matter what I decide to do, because I’ve worked so hard and made a ton of progress. And to be totally honest, that means more to me than even a medal would.

So I felt better after she talked me out of my tree, and was able to enjoy my post-lesson practice. 

There’s a 13-year-old girl who skates at one of the rinks I go to. I’ll call her Emma (not her real name). She started skating a few months ago, and she’s very serious and passionate about it, but she’s also perpetually totally freaked out because she thinks she started “too old”. I talk with her about it kind of a lot. I’ve told her about a friend of mine who started skating when she was 12 and got hired by Holiday On Ice right out of college to tour Europe. I told her that I didn’t start skating until I was almost 17, and stopped at 22, and started again and got one of my doubles back at 39. These things I say make an impression on Emma for a while, and then she goes back to worrying. She sets goals for herself of skills she wants to have by a certain date, and stresses about whether she’s going to be able to reach them. And even though I know that 13 is definitely not too old to have a good skating career, I can still relate to the worry.

Finally, a couple of weeks ago, I boiled it down to two things while Emma and I were talking:

1. One of the big keys to happiness and success in life (and skating) is this: forget the things you can’t change, and work like crazy on the things you can. You have to do both; just one or the other won’t work.

2. You don’t get the skills you want when you want them. You get them when you’ve earned them.

I have no idea whether Emma took any of that to heart, since it’s hard to keep that in your head at any age, let alone when you’re dealing with being thirteen. But I did.

The fact is that I’ve been just as impatient about my skating progress as Emma has been about hers. I have been stressing about things I can’t change. I can’t change the fact that I’ve only been doing figures for 18 months and never even did Moves when I skated before. I was a jumper and a spinner, and I did almost no footwork. I had four doubles but hadn’t even heard of rockers or counters. I couldn’t do a satisfactory back inside three turn, for crying out loud. So of course I’m not going to be able to do high-test figures on one foot yet. I haven’t earned them. I could have practiced eight hours a day, seven days a week for this whole year and I still wouldn’t have earned them.

I’m a perfectionist. I know how the figures are supposed to look, and a part of me is quite frankly extremely disappointed in how mine look in comparison, even though I can see that they’re much better than they were. I mean, at this time last year, I could really only do one of the figures being competed at this year’s WFC. Now I’m up to seven that I’ve done on one foot at least once. So I’m aware that my disappointment is unreasonable, and yet it still bothers me. 

But, as Nancy rightly pointed out today, if I’m going to be a good example and a good sport and actually have some fun, I have to figure out how not to be angry at myself for not being ready this year. Some days, that’s easy. Other days, it feels impossible. 

But I think the key is to change things up.

Last year at the WFC, I had a terrible third set and was almost hysterical from nerves, embarrassment, and disappointment by the time I finished.

One of my mottoes in life is, “If it’s not working, do something different.” I realized that I had to do that right then, or I was going to have a bad fourth set too. I went back to my condo and tried to sleep for a little while, but couldn’t. So I got in the car and went to the grocery store. I bought markers, poster board, and a fruit platter. I got back as my fourth set was starting, but since I wasn’t doing the first figure and was finding the five-minute warmups worse than pointless (at five minutes, my legs would just be starting to shake), I skipped the warmup and went into the locker room, where I set up the fruit platter and enlisted a student of mine and a little girl who was with her to create some posters while I was competing. One poster was for my fellow competitors, telling them that they were amazing and had done a fantastic job, and offering them some fruit. The other poster was a thank-you for the officials.

In the fourth set, I skated a truly awful LFI Maltese Cross, but managed to only put my foot down once and laugh about it. Then I did my creative figure, and it tied for first place. I skated off the ice holding the hand of one of my competitors, another figures newbie, laughing and singing, “We Are the Champions.”

I had remembered to do something different just in time: to be positive and grateful.

I recall standing around with my competitors last year while we were waiting for one of our sets to start. One of them said, half to herself, “I don’t know why I’m so nervous.”

Alicia, the chief referee, overheard her, and replied, “You’re nervous because you care.”

She was right, and that’s me too. I care about this so much. I’ve devoted a huge part of my life to it over the last year. But I have to remember that what I care about is a lot bigger than whether I do the figures well. I care about keeping figures alive for all skaters. I care about my fellow competitors and the officials and their journeys. I care about setting a good example for my students while still being real and truthful about the experience. I care about making skating friendly and safe. I care about encouraging everyone who wants to try figures, or who wants to go out on a limb and try anything that seems next to impossible. I care about the audience members enjoying themselves. I care about showing Emma that you can start “old” and still be a great skater if you work hard for a long time. I care about Karen and the tireless, superhuman work she puts in for WFS every single day. I care about Nancy and all the countless hours she put into her own training that inform all the countless hours she now puts into mine. I care about becoming a better skater, no matter how I do at Worlds this year or any other. I care about making something of myself that’s more than I am now. I care about pushing myself to leave my comfort zone. I care about being brave.

I don’t know if I have a way to resolve this war between my head and reality yet. I haven’t come up with what exactly I’m going to do differently. But I’m working on ways to be positive and grateful.

There are 65 days left until Worlds. I won’t have my figures the way I want them by then. If you watch, I guarantee you’re going to see me touch down, probably pretty often, depending on the figure. I’m not putting myself down; I’m just being realistic.

And realistically, if you watch next year, you’ll see me touch down a lot less. And the year after that, maybe you won’t see it at all. When I’ve finally earned it.

Everything in its own time.

[finefigure]

Unbreakable

Under the bludgeonings of chance,

My head is bloody, but unbowed.

                                 –William Ernest Henley, “Invictus”

It was the paragraph loop that did it.

We were the only ones on the ice. I was grappling with my biggest challenge that year: right forward inside loops. Nancy Blackwell-Grieder was working on RFO paragraph loops for the 2017 WFC.

I came around my loop just in time to see her rock onto her heel and overbalance. 

I saw it in slow motion, too far away to catch her when she fell.

After she screamed, the first thing she said was, “No, no, no, no, no…”

I don’t know what people normally say immediately after sustaining a major injury. However, I’m pretty sure you have to be a seriously focused athlete to have your overriding thought be, “This can’t happen so close to the competition.” But I knew that was what the “no”s were about.

That was around the second week of July.

On the last day of September, Nancy became the new World Figure Champion.

This recollection is not strictly in order. Trauma and excitement do that: they chop things up, bringing some into sharp focus and smearing or obliterating others.

And it is only a memory. It’s my experience of what happened, and therefore not remotely the whole story. For that, you’d have to ask her.

She didn’t want me to call 911.

“Let me see if I can get up first,” she said.

So we waited for a while. She called her husband, Tony. (I later had to call him back and explain what she’d been talking about.)

When she started shivering and still couldn’t stand, I yelled up to two boys playing in the stands above. Told them to tell the front desk there was someone injured on the ice.

In a minute, other people arrived to help. I went to gather her things and tell my student, Brendan, who had just gotten off the ice, what had happened. I barked information over my shoulder to the person on the phone with emergency services as I passed by and heard him say, “I don’t know.”

Between brief errands, I kept running back to where she was still lying on the ice. An EMT was removing her skates, and I was furious at how clumsy and rough he was being. I snatched them from him, to take them away and dry them. To do something useful. To try to blot out how hard she was shivering, every shake jolting pain through her injured body. I remember wanting to get down on the ice to hug her, try to keep her warm at least. But I couldn’t help at all.

Brendan and I followed the ambulance to the hospital in Nancy’s car. Her brother-in-law met us in the lobby and told us that she was in radiology. At some point, Brendan and I went and had lunch. I remember we lugged my skates and his and Nancy’s into every air-conditioned building we visited: it was a scorching-hot day, and we didn’t want to break down our heat-moldable skates by leaving them in the car. At some other point, Tony came out to the waiting room and sat with us while Nancy was in CT.

At a third point, I was in her hospital room with her, holding one of her hands while Tony held the other. She’d been given heavy painkillers and was kind of adorably loopy for a few minutes until a nurse came in and told us that the scans had shown that she had no broken bones. I couldn’t believe it, but I was so relieved.

The nurse said to Nancy, “Do you want to try standing up?”

The loopiness gone, Nancy put a hand to her face and took a couple of deep breaths.

“Sure,” she gritted.

I looked across her at Tony and said quietly, “That was really a no.”

He nodded. But the nurse was there, cheerfully, briskly insistent.

I left to give her some privacy. Nothing like having an audience for your most painful moments, particularly when you’re in a hospital gown.

The standing up did not go well.

They discharged her anyway, for some reason extremely reluctant to provide her with a wheelchair to get to the car, and telling her that no, they didn’t have any crutches, and anyway, she should try to just walk.

A later MRI revealed what the CT and x-rays had missed: two fractures to the pelvis and a torn right labrum. (Incidentally, had she tried to walk as advised by the emergency department personnel, she might have displaced the fracture and had to have surgery.)

No Worlds for her this year, I thought sadly.

It’s the afternoon of September 29, Day 1 of the championships. Nancy and I are in the same flight of competitors for this first set of figures. Everyone in the flight is standing by the door to the ice, waiting for the chief referee, Alicia, to give us our patch letters and instructions.

Nancy bends over, breathing hard, nauseous from nerves. I go over to try to comfort her, rub her back, and she leans against me. I can feel her heart pounding. It calms me down to have someone else to focus on. Something to do. A way to be useful.

Alicia arrives. We stand up straight and listen.

A week after the accident, Nancy was back coaching from the hockey box. For patch class, she had an on-ice assistant coach. Also, I scribed circles in front of where she was standing with her crutches, and she called people over to her one by one so she could see their tracings while she taught them. World Figure Sport’s Figure It Out Workshop was at the end of the month, and some of her students were testing and competing. I was one of them. It was my first competition ever, and some other people’s too. She didn’t want to let us down.

At the workshop, we pushed Nancy around the ice on a chair so she could help teach the workshop skaters. She acted as the chief referee for the exams and competition. Afterward, she drove Karen Courtland Kelly to the airport and then drove another hour back home.

A week or two after that, she told me she was getting back on the ice: she had a student who learned best by being moved around physically. The inside of my head started screaming a little. I asked her if she wanted me to be there. I could even move the student for her. She said she’d be fine, that I shouldn’t bother to come.

I said OK, but then found that I couldn’t sleep the night before that lesson. And I thought, Everything will probably be fine. But will you be able to live with yourself if it’s not?

I was lacing up my skates the next morning when Nancy walked in the door. She stopped dead and gave me the eye.

“You are so silly,” she informed me.

I shrugged. Whether I was silly or not, I had to make sure she was all right.

Everything was fine that day. The kid had a good lesson, and nobody fell over.

About a week after that, Nancy started practicing again. Face drawn, lips white, body shaking.

She’d catch me looking at her and say, “It’s only pain.”

Yeah.

“How is she doing that?” Richard Swenning whispers in my ear. We’re in the stands of Dobson Ice Arena in Vail, watching Nancy compete the double three. She’s on her third tracing, and it looks like close to one line where she comes nearest to us.

“I don’t know,” I mutter back, “but that’s her bad leg.”

Four tracings. Right on.

Five.

“How is she doing that?!”

I just shake my head.

Six.

We let our breaths out.

A funny thing: if you ask her how she was doing that, how she made it through any of it, she’ll say she has no idea.

Well, that makes all of us.

Once Nancy got back to preparing for the competition, I only saw her really discouraged once, and then just for a few minutes. We were practicing a couple of weeks before the WFC. I was in the hockey box retying my skate, and she abandoned her tracings and came to the boards where I was.

“I can’t feel it,” she said. “I can’t feel any of it anymore.”

I made some joke welcoming her to my world, but she wasn’t in a laughing mood.

“Yes, but no one expects you to feel it,” she rejoined, on the verge of tears. “I should be able to.”

I grabbed her gently by the sleeve.

“Hey. You’ve got this,” I told her.

“No. I don’t have this!” She named a couple of our competitors. “I know they can feel everything!”

“You’re not them. They’re not coming from where you’re coming from. You can only do what you can do. Right now. And even if you can’t feel it, your body knows what it’s supposed to do.”

She stood there for a moment, staring out at her tracings. Then she took a deep breath, nodded to herself, and skated back to them.

That was all.

The score sheet for the second-to-last flight of the competition – my flight – has just been posted. I do some quick math, smile, and make my way into the stands, joining two of Nancy’s young students on the floor by the boards at her patch.

My grin fades. It’s time for the paragraph loop.

In one hand, I’m holding one of Nancy’s pre-Worlds gifts to me: a little plush snowy owl. The fingers of my other hand are at my throat, touching the pendant of the necklace that was her other present. Two good-luck charms. I hope.

The whistle blows.

I’m barely aware that I’m stream-of-consciousness coaching her in a whisper. Bend, hold it, hold it, easy. That’s one. Great, right there, you’re fine, you’ve got this, come on, hold on. Two. Good. I don’t think I’m breathing. There’s more tension in me now than when I was on the ice less than an hour ago skating my own figures.

An agonizing two minutes later, she finishes the figure and skates off to prepare for the next one. I relax a little. She isn’t quite out of the woods yet, but she’s conquered the nemesis. I start smiling again.

Unable to keep the reason to myself, I lean over and say quietly to the nine-year-old next to me, “Do you know what happens now?”

She looks my way, shaking her head.

“If Nancy doesn’t fall, or touch down more than twice on the next three figures, she wins.”

The girl’s eyes go wide. I nod and show her my crossed fingers. She returns her attention to the ice, leaning forward on the boards. I slide over and say the same thing to the twelve-year-old, a more reserved child, who regards me solemnly for a moment and then nods once before shifting her eyes back to the action. (“So you’re who got them all worked up!” exclaims the older girl’s mother later. “They said they’d never been so nervous in their lives!”)

 Swiss S.

 Done.

 Maltese Cross.

 Done.

 Creative figure…

  Done.

 The two kids turn to me for a second, their eyes wild and shining, as we all applaud.

Later, Nancy will have a suspicion confirmed: she has severe osteoporosis throughout her body, to the point where some of her bones are difficult to see in x-rays. It would be dangerous for her to keep competing. Even so, it will take her a long time to bring herself to announce her retirement.

Nancy quit skating the first time after she passed her gold figure test in her late teens. When you quit skating as a teenager, you do it knowing that you’re giving up a high-level skating career for good. Maybe you’re sorry, or maybe you’re glad, but you know it’s permanent.

But then what if, through a set of completely unforeseen circumstances, that turns out not to be true? What if suddenly, one day when you’re in your early 50s, this crazy chance appears for you to skate again?

You grab it and run with it, because nobody gets a chance like that.

Imagine that. And then fast forward just three years and imagine being told that no, actually, you really shouldn’t do it anymore after all. No, now that you’re hooked on it all again, now that you love it again, more than you did the first time, now that you’re really good and getting some recognition for it—you need to stop.

Don’t get me wrong: I think it’s a good decision. It’s just that I can see that it might take a while to reconcile oneself to making it.

When she finally does that in the spring of 2018, she will throw herself wholeheartedly into being a coach and a WFS official. She’ll be the special guest judge at a workshop, standing in for Janet Lynn. Her patch class will become so popular that she will have to consider putting a cap on attendance. She’ll have retired from competing only to jump into another, bigger set of roles. It won’t be the same, but I suspect that it will grow into something even better.

But right now…

The competitors are lining up on the ice against the boards as the finishing touches are made to the awards podium. Dorothy Hamill is over there on the other side of the rink, getting ready to place the gold medal around the neck of the 2017 Ladies’ World Figure Champion. Olympians, world champions, and skating show stars are milling around casually in the background.

Standing here next to me on this magic black ice, Nancy murmurs, “Doesn’t this feel surreal?”

“No,” I tell her. “It feels exactly right.”

World Figure Sport has recently set up a scholarship fund in honor of Nancy. If you were moved by Nancy’s championship win, I know she would love it if you would donate to that fund, which will help introduce more skaters to the world of figures. You can make a donation by clicking here:

 https://squareup.com/store/world-figure-sport/item/wfs-s-nancy-blackwell-grieder-scholarship

Thank you for reading!

[finefigure]

What Am I Doing This For?

To be completely honest, I had a less-than-satisfactory practice today. It was crowded on the freestyle, so I decided to do small figures, only to realize that my back and left leg were just not having with the speedy twistiness of the small figures right then. I got off the ice ten minutes before the session was over (which I consider sacrilege) when my leg just up and quit working normally, choosing instead to behave as if it had been suddenly possessed by the soul of a sloth.

This is not an uncommon occurrence. Well, the sloth thing is, but me being in so much pain I can barely understand what my coach is saying or remember which figure I’m skating happens at least 25% of the time these days. It’s a disc thing. Not much to be done about it that I’m not already doing, aside from cortisone shots, which I can’t afford.

I sometimes wish I were one of those people who bears pain with silent dignity, but for better or worse, I am instead one of those people who talks about it. And I’m going to stand by my belief that that’s OK. Because pain is real, and it’s not glamorous, and it’s part of being an athlete---particularly an adult athlete.

And boy, did I have a lot of it today. So much so that I thought it would be good for me to write about what keeps me going, and who and what I am doing this for.

I’m doing it for myself.

I’ve said this before. I love skating, and I particularly love figures. There’s something very satisfying about the symmetry and the striving for perfection, and the crunch of the ice under patch blades, and and and... I love them; that’s all. And through figures, I get to meet people I never thought I’d meet, and do things I never dreamed I’d be able to do.

(An incomplete collection of skating paraphernalia that can be found within five feet of my front door on any given day. Top row: Paper on which Nancy got autographs for me at the 2016 Championships, including those of Trixi Schuba, Gary Visconti, Jan Calnan, and Juliana Sweeney-Baird; a graphic issued by WFS of my 2017 creative figure, framed by my mom. Middle row: Just a picture of me and Dorothy Hamill chilling together at the 2017 WFC like we do, also framed by my mom; a photo of Nancy from Deborah Hickey’s beautiful book; a card from Barbara Wagner; my faithful stretchy gloves; one of my former patch boots, signed by Nancy. Bottom row: Someone’s discarded laces--I have literally no idea which of my 18 past or present patch students they belong to; a blade that was once attached to my patch boots; my scribe; my other former patch boot, signed by Barbara Wagner. So, yeah, maybe I’m into this skating thing a little.)

I’m doing it for figure skating.

I believe that it’s vitally important to preserve figures. More than that, I believe that it’s vitally important for all skaters to do figures. I am a rabid figures evangelist, and if you get close enough to me, I will probably infect you if you don’t have the bug already. Right now, competing and coaching are the ways I am attempting to preserve figures: learning from the best and passing it down. 

I’m doing it for WFS.

I really, really believe in what World Figure Sport does, and not just the preservation of figures part. The judges want to judge the figures on their own merits; they don’t want to know who skated what. You are eligible to compete if you are human--and I’m guessing that if another species showed an interest in skating figures, WFS would let them in too. The main thing is really to enjoy figures and do your best. You should have heard all of the competitors in the dressing room coaching each other and asking each other questions at the 2017 WFC. Lisa wrote to me today and said that something I’d mentioned about my own training had helped her fix her rockers. Talking to my competitors has helped me fix things about my skating time and again as well; my patch neighbor, Julie, has great insights. Sarah Jo and I message each other for encouragement/good-natured complaints/advice every few days. Competitors help each other design their creative figures. I told my dad that, and he asked if maybe it was a bad idea to help someone I’m trying to beat. I said we’re not like that; we all want everyone to do as well as they possibly can, and we’re glad to help each other get there. We lift one another up. It makes my heart so happy.

I’m doing it for my students.

I want to share my love of figures with my students (particularly since I require them all to skate them). Also, they are all university students, and usually beginners, and they’re at an age where they’ve heard they’ll never accomplish anything in sports. But they can’t believe that if they see me doing this, can they? 

I’m doing it for my coach.

When I told Nancy that I want to be champion one day like she is now, she didn’t tell me I was too old to be that kind of athlete, or that I could stand to lose 30 pounds first, or that maybe my dream would have been possible if I’d been trained better as a kid, but since I hadn’t been, this wasn’t a realistic thing to hope for. She just listened to me and then said quietly, “We’ll work it out,” and got on with teaching me as hard as she could. Just try to keep yourself from wanting to work your feet off for someone like that. It can’t be done.

Also, to be honest, it’s pretty much impossible to give up due to the pain of a mere bulging disc and some moderate arthritis at age 42 after having just watched your coach skate to a world championship win on a broken pelvis and torn labrum at age 55. So there’s that.

I’m doing it for you.

If you enjoy watching me skate or looking at my figures, then I’m doing it for you. 

And more specifically, some of you who are reading this might have started skating (or skating figures) “late”--whatever that meant to the person who told you that.

When I started skating the first time around, at 16 years old, most people said I was too old to have any kind of “real” skating career. When I was 22, I got very sick and didn’t skate more than a couple of times between then and the age of 39. I started figures when I was 41. That’s very, very, very late, if you believe what most people say.

It’s not true. It wasn’t true for me, and it’s not true for you either. If you are out there on the ice, you are exactly the right age, no matter when you started. We can only be who we are now, and the great thing is that that’s enough.

I am scared to do this competition. But I’m going to do it anyway. And if it is at all possible, I’m going to keep doing it, every year, until I beat the paragraph loops and rockers and Swiss S into submission and win the whole thing.

If that happens, then someone will have won who never tested figures under the old system, who never competed in skating at all or even had a figures lesson until she was over the age of 40, who had been supposedly “too old” to start skating in the first place, and who was never a member of ISI or USFS.

Ralph Hodgson wrote, “Some things have to be believed to be seen.” That’s the stage I’m in right now. I just have to keep working through the pain and occasional bad practices and cling like a tick to my belief that this can be done.

But it is certainly easier to believe once you have seen. That’s why I want to show you.

If I can do it someday, maybe you’ll see that you can too.

[finefigure]

What’s the Score? And Why?

WFC competition and scoring are different from any other skating you’re used to. It’s not difficult to understand at all. But I’ve discovered when trying to describe it that it has a surprising number of parts to it, and I end up sounding like my five-year-old self trying to describe a complicated movie plot: “And, oh, except before that happened, there was this other thing...”

So maybe I’d better do this in list form.

1. The black ice is divided by white lines into 8 competition areas (“patches”) and 2 warmup patches.

2. There’s a cap of 16 male and 16 female competitors. However, as mentioned above, there are only 8 competition patches. Therefore, if there are more than 8 competitors of a given gender, then the competitors are split randomly into two groups, called “flights”. This has never happened to the men so far, because we don’t tend to get a lot of male competitors (why yes, that is a friendly challenge to you male skaters out there!), but it happens to the women every time.

3. When your flight is called, you go out with the other competitors, have a five-minute warmup, and then everyone takes their positions on their randomized patches. They announce the figure to be skated, let you find a good position on your patch, and blow the whistle. Everyone skates that figure, and then goes back to the warmup patch for a minute or so before the next figure. You do that four times, and then you and your competitors go back into the dressing room during the judging. The judges never see you with your skates on, and your patches don’t have your names on them; you’re assigned a different randomized letter every time, and only the chief referee and the accountant have that list.

       a. Every time you put a foot down when you aren’t supposed to, three points are added to your score.

       b. Every time you fall (and it totally happens...loops and the Swiss S are the usual culprits), three points are added to your score.

       c. Every time you go over the allotted time in which to skate a figure, three points are added to your score. (You get a 10-second warning whistle before the “time’s up” whistle... this can sometimes be alarming if you’ve been concentrating so hard you’re afraid you might not have heard the first whistle.)

If you get any of these penalty points, the referee assigned to your patch will check them over with you and have you sign their scorecards to indicate that you agree with the tally.

4. Other than the part about the penalty points, scoring is based on a ranking system. First place is one point; second place is two, etc. So obviously, you want the smallest number of points possible.

5. Each figure skated by each person is ranked against the same figure skated by the other people in that flight. So my paragraph loop is compared to everyone else’s paragraph loops, but only the ones on the ice right now. This is important. So if there are 13 women skating and I’m in the group with 6 people in it, the lowest place I can get is sixth. If I’m in the group with 7 people in it, the lowest place I can get is seventh. Nobody ever gets 13th place (although they haven’t seen my LFO Swiss S yet... they may want to make an exception, lol). This is evened out by the fact that we’re randomized into different groups every time, while they still make sure that each person is in the group of 7 twice and the group of 6 twice.

6. Each judge is assigned a different aspect to examine for each figure. For example, one would look just at edges and turns, another would evaluate size and alignment of circles, and a third would do an overall ranking. Some years, there are more judges, so the assignments get broken down further.

7. Magic happens. Or rather, the judges turn in their marks, the refs turn in their notes on penalties, and the accountant adds them up, matches the scores up to the patch numbers, matches the patch numbers to the names, and posts the scores. Usually this all happens kind of mindblowingly quickly, as the accountant is, as I implied above, a wizard.

The score sheets look like this:

8. Judges are allowed to tie your figures with someone else’s.

9. If you’re competing some of the figures but not the full championship, you will be ranked among all the other competitors in the full ranking, but your name won’t appear in the championship ranking. Therefore, partial-championship skaters’ figures don’t affect the full-championship competitors’ overall competition standings. Your name also won’t appear on the scoreboard in the rink if you’re a partial-championship competitor. 

(See in the score sheet above how competitor Griffiths is in the overall standings in the middle [under SCORES of COMPETITORS and ASPIRANTS], but not in the CHAMPIONSHIP COMPETITOR SCORES at the bottom? If you look at his points, you can see that in this set, he only competed the RFI Maltese Cross; all the other scores were zero. That, by the way, is my student, who had been skating for less than a year total at that point. Not that I am still bursting my buttons with pride or anything, Brendan!)

...

The thoughtful reader will have picked up that foot touches are punished way worse than anything else, and have the potential to add on some serious penalty points--particularly if, like yours truly, a competitor struggles with getting around some of the more difficult figures. This leads to some truly amusing-looking figures at the moment as I run out of speed 3/4 of the way through my change 3 and power pull my way back to center. (I wonder if I could learn to trace the power pulls.) I even have a photo somewhere of one of my FI loop practice figures last year, where in the very last tracing, I stood up on my knee too soon, did a double RFI twizzle across the exit half of the loop, pulled myself back to center, and finished the figure with a loop on the other side. Because that was the practice when I had finally decided that I was not. Putting. My. Foot. Down.

...

The thoughtful reader/attentive picture-viewer will also have picked up that the judges’ rankings are not averaged per figure; a skater gets points from each judge for each figure. So if each of the three judges from last year had given my FO8 a 1st place (which, I might put in, they most emphatically and rightfully did not), I would have had 3 points for that figure. So if you absolutely slay the entire competition and place first in every figure with every judge, and you have no foot touches, no time penalties, and no falls, the lowest possible total you could have, if there are three judges, would be 48. If there are 16 competitors in your gender group, and you place dead last in every figure with every one of the three judges, then the highest possible score you could have would be 384.

But hey, the sky’s the limit on those foot faults. No pressure! :)

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Live life as if everything is rigged in your favor.

Rumi

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The (Incomplete) Competitors’ Guide to Vail

I was talking to one of my fellow competitors the other day, and it struck me that it would probably be helpful to make a list of the issues some of us ran into last year, with some solutions if we found them. Some of these are just general things about the competition, but some are directly related to the fact that Vail is at an elevation of 8,000 feet, which presents some challenges, particularly to people who are coming from sea level or thereabouts.

1. Some people got altitude sickness (dizziness, exhaustion, headache, vomiting, insomnia, hallucinations, vivid dreams), and they were pretty miserable. I don’t really know what the solution to that is, but if you’re competing and you can get even just to Denver (elevation: 5200 feet) or Colorado Springs (6000 feet) several days early, you can start acclimatizing yourself a bit. Unfortunately, full acclimatization takes a lot longer than most people can spend doing it for the purposes of this competition, but you can at least give yourself a leg up. I hear that elevation/altitude acclimatization centers even exist, as do various medications. Might be worth looking into. Those of us who were from the Denver/Boulder/Colorado Springs area and from the Utah mountains were just fine, so if you’re coming from a hometown that sits at 5,000 feet or higher, you probably won’t feel much of anything. 

2. It is incredibly dry in Vail. I’m used to low humidity, because I live in Colorado, but whatever is going on in Vail is negative humidity or something. It’s like the air comes and actively sucks the moisture out of you. Everyone was getting dehydrated by the third day. My lips and cuticles were cracking. One of my fellow competitors ran to the grocery store on the second day of the competition and brought me back some Propel. I am still deeply grateful (thank you, Laura). Electrolyte pills plus lots of water also help. Gatorade is better than nothing, but fairly worthless. Lotion and lip balm are your friends.

3. If it snows, you’re stuck there. Last year, those of us who stayed until Sunday night ended up in the middle of a blizzard. Some people were understandably pretty upset about that, because they had lives to get back to. Unfortunately, there was literally nothing to be done about it. They close down Vail Pass and the airport (see below) if it gets too snowy. So it helps to be aware that that’s a possibility, and to maybe give yourself a light schedule for the week after Worlds if you can, just in case. Oh, and buy travel insurance and have money for an extra day or two in a hotel.

4. Yes, Vail has an airport, but you may not want to use it. The Eagle County Airport is 35 miles away from Vail, so if you fly into Eagle County, you have to then take a bus to Vail itself. Flights are usually fairly expensive, so most people fly to Denver International Airport and then take a bus or get a lift with one of us locals to Vail, or they rent a car. (Once you’re in Vail, you don’t have much need of a car, since there’s a shuttle bus that goes just about everywhere in the town, and there are also plenty of people at the competition who have cars and will take you where you want to go.) Eagle County is also one of the more dangerous airports in the US due to weather and terrain conditions, although at least they’ve extended the runway now. 

5. There are restaurants everywhere, but they’re expensive. Remember that Vail is a ski resort town. We’re lucky that we go there in the autumn when not much is going on, so the hotels/condos are reasonable. But the food can be pricey. There are grocery stores, of course. The food is more expensive there than in the grocery stores in Denver, for example, but it’s cheaper than restaurant food. Some people opt for a condo instead of a hotel room specifically so they can make their own food.

6. Private airport shuttles to Vail are a rip-off. Last year, we were trying to figure out the cheapest way of getting everyone to Vail from Denver, and we discovered that private shuttles were emphatically not it. If you’re having a hard time figuring out how to get to Vail from the Denver airport, please post on the Compulsory Figures Project page or message me, and we’ll do our best to get you sorted without you having to shell out $300 for a van ride to Vail.

7. The Evergreen Lodge is a two-minute walk to Dobson Ice Arena. The majority of the competitors and some of the officials stayed at the Evergreen last year. It has a couple of restaurants in it, and could not be closer to the rink if it tried. It’s great for ease of access and for socializing. :) There are also lots of AirBNB/VRBO condos near the rink, mostly in an area called Lionshead Village. Vail is split by a highway, and unless you have a car, it’s pretty inconvenient to end up in a condo on the other side of the highway from the rink, so it’s a good idea to check out a map before you rent a condo.

8. We’re all there to help each other out. By day 2 of the competition, you are most likely going to need to grab a nap at some point. This thing is a marathon. Because there are more than eight women competing, we don’t know which group we’re skating in for any given set until the previous set is finished. Last year, those of us who were staying to watch another set would volunteer to text the people who needed a break, to let them know the skating order when it was posted. That’s just one example of hundreds of big and small ways I saw competitors, refs, and judges helping each other during the 2017 championship. This is not a cutthroat skating competition. We take it very seriously, because we care about what we’re doing--but that doesn’t keep people from being kind, making friends, and having fun. We had lots of laughs in the locker room and lovely moments on the ice together last year, and I know this year is going to be just as good or even better. 

If you have any questions about what I’ve said above, or about anything else--or if you have anything to add or an amendment to make to what I’ve said--please leave a comment by clicking on the yellow “COMMENT HERE!” in the header of my blog, and I’ll be happy to provide an answer if I’m able, or direct you to someone who knows if I don’t.

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“Eat a Live Frog First Thing...”

Recently, I was feeling kind of scattered about what to practice. It all seemed just huge and overwhelming, and like there was not enough time before Worlds in which to do it all. I would get on the ice and just feel sort of lost. What do you work on when everything needs work? So a couple of weeks ago, Nancy and I sat down and talked about this. And what she’s having me do now is to go out at every practice and do one set of four figures first thing, just as if it’s the competition: a five-minute warmup, and then the first figure, timed, and then a two-minute warmup, and then the next figure, etc.

So far, I’ve done this for sets 1, 2, and 4; I’ll be doing set 3 at practice tomorrow. And let me tell you: it is awful, and I’m super glad she’s having me do it, for that very reason. It makes me nervous to do it, all alone at my own rink, so the more times I do that, the less likely I am to completely blank out at the championships. Plus, I now know, for each figure, how many times I touch my foot down when I’m not supposed to, which was exactly what we needed to pinpoint.

See, Nancy and I are both perfectionists, so it’s easy for us to get caught up in trying to make every little thing I do perfect. This is a fantastic long-run strategy, but for my short-term goal of getting through Worlds without racking up like 400 points in touchdowns and feeling like I look like an idiot, it’s probably not ideal. One day soon, we will work on making things perfect. Right now, though, I just need to get through the figures.

I have therefore created a schedule for my practices (P) and my lessons (L), as follows. The number after the letter represents the set of figures to practice or concentrate on in the lesson:

I have the rest of the months before Worlds laid out like this too. 

Ever since I started doing this, I have been thinking about that quote by Mark Twain: “Eat a live frog first thing in the morning, and nothing worse will happen to you the rest of the day.” Starting off with the competition figures and practically no warmup is stressful. It was particularly bad today, when I did set 4, which starts off with the LFOI paragraph loop. As someone who probably couldn’t completely pass the USFS second figure test at the moment, starting off practice with a gold test figure is not a recipe for disaster at alllll. I feel super good about myself after that. :(

But there’s nothing for it but to keep plugging. And I have to confess that the live-frog-breakfast phenomenon is real: I feel much better about life when I’ve finished my mock-competition practice for the day. Mostly because I don’t have to do it again for another 24 hours. And because no matter how badly I do it, at least I’m gathering data every time for how to do it better the next time.

And because, terrifying or not, I love it.

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The Best-Laid Plans...

Here is one of the many things about being a self-supporting, independently-definitely-non-wealthy adult athlete that most kids who are athletes don’t have to deal with:

Gainful employment.

Now, I (mostly) love my jobs. I’m a freelance translator, editor, proofreader, and copywriter, and I also teach skating at CU Boulder. If I had a 9-to-5-type job, it would be next to impossible for me to train as much as I do. I am deeply grateful for that.

Having said that... man, does work get in the way sometimes.

Take this past seven-day period. Last week at about this time, I got a bunch of projects. That was fantastic: money is good. I estimated the time it would take for me to do them, then doubled the estimate (because my time estimation skills are... how shall I put this... on a par with my current paragraph loop skills), and got down to work.

Yeah... should have tripled the time estimate. Because I was up all night long.

That was a Wednesday night/Thursday morning. I finally got the work done, got some sleep, and practiced on Thursday afternoon for Friday patch class and my lesson. Didn’t even feel too dizzy and out-of-body. And class and my lesson were great: they were the first ones I’d been to in a month, because my coach had been out of town, and I was super happy that she was back! :) 

I got a good night’s sleep on Friday, but unfortunately, I’d done the damage to myself on Wednesday night/Thursday morning. I always feel the sleep deprivation worst on the third day. So I spent a large portion of Saturday sleeping, another large portion of it staring at the wall because sleep deprivation hangover causes me to experience depression symptoms, and a smaller portion working on my next set of projects. No practice.

On Sunday, I felt great. I got up early, worked a little, and had breakfast with one of my awesome students, and then we went to practice together. I spent some time teaching her and some time practicing.

Then I went home to work. And... yeah, the time estimate problem again. Because I worked almost all night. Again. This time because stupid little things that I couldn’t have foreseen kept going wrong. I’d been counting on going to the 7 a.m. practice on Monday, but had to scrap that. There was another session from 10 to noon, and I managed to get there, woozy and irritable, at 10:30... just in time for the three half-hour lessons I had to teach. I would have had no practice time at all, but my first student was a no-show. 

Teaching cheered me up, as it almost always does. I ran some errands after that, since I had almost run out of food during the work blitz of the past few days. It was gorgeous outside, so I soaked up some sun while doing it. Hopefully, that will at least somewhat offset the depression I know is coming tomorrow again.

But, given the rink schedule, there’s nothing I can do about the fact that I’m going into today’s lesson with only about an hour and a half of practice since my last lesson, which just irritates and frustrates me. Luckily, I stored up a ton of questions and little tiny problems while Nancy was away that we didn’t have time to get to on Friday, so at least there’s that.

I swear: I really have been getting better at the time estimation stuff. I’ve cut my number of sleep-deprived days waaay down from even a year ago. I just happened to really mess it up twice in a row this week. 

Anyway, this is just a minor example of how adulting can mess with training. And a lot of people my age have a ton more stuff on their plates than I do, like kids or a significant other or a dog or a big house or aging parents who need ongoing assistance, or that 9-to-5 job I mentioned. So to those of you who are trying to be an athlete while dealing with all those things: all I can say is, never doubt that you have superpowers.

[finefigure]

“Fezzik, you did something right!” “Don’t worry; I won’t let it go to my head.”

I competed six of the sixteen figures at Worlds in 2017. I found out I was competing in mid-August, and Worlds was the last week in September. (Yeah, I was equal parts elated and terrified.) The figures I chose were the forward inside 8, the forward outside 8, the forward inside loop, the right forward inside Maltese Cross, the left forward inside Maltese Cross, and the creative figure.

I thought I was going to flat-out lose every single figure, but it turned out the only one every judge ranked dead last was the one I’d worked hardest on: the forward inside loop. Oh, the painful irony. I didn’t even completely lose the LFI Maltese Cross, which I really just should not have competed. It looked like a clawed animal had been dropped on the ice and just flailed there in horrible desperation until someone had mercy on it and came and picked it up. But my absolute obsession, the FI loops, which I had worked on in literally every practice since March: all the nopes. Loops are hard.

It took me quite a while to come up with the creative figure, mostly because how does one do that, anyway? I had no clue. Basically, I just kind of noodled around on the ice for a while and came up with a whole bunch of different things that never quite fell together.

And then I realized something: I wanted a happy, friendly figure that soothed me when I skated it. The creative figure is the last figure in the competition, and even if you don’t compete all the figures, you are completely wrung out by then. I wanted to finish with something I loved. Something that relaxed me and made me smile.

Shortly after I had that epiphany, my creative figure started coming together. I drew on a design called the triskelion, which has roots in my Celtic ancestry. I found it beautiful and soothing to skate. So that is what I went with.

Imagine my surprise when it tied for first. And then my utter shock when it developed a fan base, including people who actually tattooed it on their bodies.

I have never identified as a visual artist. I still don’t. But I’m thoroughly in love with creative figures now. I wish we could compete more than one of them per year.

My creative figure was easy to skate; I made it that way on purpose, both so it would be fun for me and so it would be accessible for lower-level skaters if they wanted to try it. It just also happened to be unusual and pleasing to the eye, and I was able to trace it well because it was easy, so it stood out on the ice.

I’m definitely not confusing design with skill: I know I’m not a good skater yet. When I can trace a paragraph loop, then maybe we’ll be venturing into good-skater-land.

I won’t deny that it was awfully nice to have that little taste of approval from the judges and the audience. But don’t worry; I won’t let it go to my head. ;) 

TFW Dorothy Hamill is taking a picture of your creative figure.

[finefigure]

Practice makes...

I’ve started taking notes on my practices, partly to confirm to myself that yes, I really am actually making progress, and partly to make sure that I use my practice time efficiently and on things I really need for the competition. Here’s a sample from a typical practice.

May 8, 2018. Practice duration: 2 hours 45 minutes.

10 LFI loops (some problem today)

10 RFI loops

10 LFO loops, 10 RFO loops: concentrate on sneaking free foot around (don’t swing)

10 LFO loops, 10 RFO loops: body up

10 LFO loops: just relax and let the edge take you; this seems to work almost as well as concentrating on everything

10 LFO loops: make circle with arms

10 LFO loops: shoulder drop, knee bend

10 RBI Counters

5 LFI Counters

10 LFO Rockers

5 RBO Rockers

1 full BO8

Several full FO8s —STRETCHING the twist before this figure eliminates the LFO push breaking-at-waist problem

Some BI8, FParagraph8, F Loop COE, Swiss S, and Maltese Cross work

10 RBO loops, 10 LBO loops: snapping legs together right after Schaefer push helps get in proper position. These were terrible, but it was the first time I ever did the left!

20 RFI loop to COE for paragraph loop

My gentle readers (if any) will notice in the second-to-last item that that day was the first day I had ever done LBO loops in a figure from a Schaefer push. Hey...4 months is plenty of time to get those into competition shape, right? Hahahahaha noooo problem! ;)

[finefigure]

[finefigure]

Whether you think you can, or you think you can't--you're right.

Henry Ford

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Because I’m Crazy, That’s Why.

After looking at my level of experience, you may be asking yourself why/how someone like me is competing at a world championship.

There’s a simple answer in the title to this post, but of course, there’s more to it than that.

Drilling down:

...I almost called this post, “Karen Made Me Do It.” That’s a joke, of course: I am a grown woman, and there are few things anyone can actually make me do. Karen Courtland Kelly, a 1994 US Olympian in pairs skating and the head of World Figure Sport, is an endlessly energetic, enthusiastic, and passionate person, and it is absolutely true that without her earnest and ongoing encouragement, I would not be doing this at all. (Also, if WFS hadn’t made the WFC into an open championship in 2017, I’d be years away from competition.)

...But I would never even have met Karen if it hadn’t been for Nancy. Back in the spring of 2015, when the first WFC was announced, my friend Nancy looked at the qualification requirements for the competitors and realized that she qualified: she had passed her 8th USFS figure test when she was a teenager. After some thought, she sent a brief email to WFS to ask whether someone like her could compete. About an hour later, I got a voicemail that mostly consisted of sounds that only a bat could hear, from which I managed to glean that Karen had called Nancy and said, Yes. We want you to compete.

So she did. And I watched her on live streaming in 2015 from Lake Placid where she placed 8th, and in 2016 from Toronto where she placed 6th, and then I was there in 2017 in Vail to watch her win. More on all that amazingness in another post. To stay on topic, skating alongside her while she trained and eventually becoming her student were both giant steps on the way to my current situation.

...But I would never have met Nancy if it hadn’t been for a Facebook page called The Compulsory Figures Project, begun and moderated by Mr. Richard Stansberry, who is now also a friend. I joined the page to feed my budding interest in figures, which I had never learned when I was young, due to the fact that I’d started skating after ISU had phased figures out of competitions. One day, a woman posted a video of herself skating loops, and I recognized the rink as the one in the next town over. I messaged her, and we met up for coffee and talked our faces off for a couple of hours, and that’s how Nancy and I became friends.

...But I would never have joined The Compulsory Figures Project page if I didn’t love skating enough to be passionate about good technique, which is what figures teach better than any other exercise ever devised. 

...And that’s why I’m doing this, really. Because I love skating, and because I always wanted to be extremely good at it, but some lack of resources always stood in my way before: money, health, time, opportunity, instruction. And “common wisdom” in the skating world has always maintained that you have to start much younger than I was when I started skating the first time around in order to ever get good, so I never really held out any hope that I could have a skating career. (More on my opinion on skating ageism in another post.)

Now I have the chance, and the resources, and there is no way I’m going to waste them.

Don’t get me wrong: I am currently on a different planet than the one on which my comfort zone is located. By nature, I’m a high achiever. I don’t usually get into important things without a well-founded sense that I’m going to do objectively extremely well at them. So going into this knowing that I’m going to lose spectacularly--at least this year--is causing me record-breaking amounts of angst, to be completely honest. I am acutely aware that everyone else in the competition either passed high-level figures tests back in the day, or has been skating nonstop their whole lives with years of expert coaching invested in them, or both.

But I am where I am. Right now. And, crazy or not, it’s where I want to be.

That’s a whole lot of lucky, if you ask me.

[finefigure]

This Is Me

Hey there, and welcome to my blog! I’m starting it as a way to document my experience training for and competing in the World Figure Championships.

A little about me:

Name: Elisa

Age: 42

Sports federation: World Figure Sport Society (worldfiguresport.org)

General skating experience: 10 years (ages 17-22 and 39-42)

Figure lesson experience: 17 months (start: January 2017)

Coach: Nancy Blackwell-Grieder, 2017 Ladies’ World Figure Champion

I’m super verbose, so some of my blog posts are going to be pretty long, but I’ll keep this one brief. Thanks for reading!