- voyeur

When your kid no longer skates and you visit a local competition, you always feel like a voyeur, enjoying the guilty pleasure of watching something that should remain private. Well they do let outside folks in, and it's usually only around five dollars for the whole day. It's not like they specifically discourage visitors, and it's hard to beat the entertainment value. Still whenever I run into my daughter's former coach at another competition her first remarks to me are always "What are you doing here?" My standard response has always been to shrug and reply "Just hanging out."

I still like to visit local competitions to provide emotional support for the up and coming skaters. I rather expect them to pick up on my brainwaves while they are out there, and my specific observations (laden with all that prior viewing experience) must impart some sort of higher standards upon them. With the younger skaters nearly half the time I'm thinking "get yourself to the gym" or "more sit-ups" or "stroking class." Juniors and above already know their athletics, so at that point it's all mental comments about style, musical expressiveness, or jump dynamics.

Despite my honorable intentions though it's still a challenge walking into an environment where I might not belong. The reason I feel a constant obtuse and nearly pathological undercurrent of voyeurism is because I get to witness skilled people working under difficult conditions of exceedingly high duress (both the skaters and their parents). It's almost perversely unfair that I can do this totally relaxed while not being a participant, for just five bucks.

- injury

Falling on the ice is such a common part of practice that after a few years you don't much think of it any longer. You still occasionally slip yet you have your "muscle memory" of how to tumble without getting too badly hurt, outside of the usual bruises.

Muscle memory is an interesting phenomenon, and there wouldn't be figure skating without it (or most any other sport for that matter). It would be impossible to coordinate the hundreds of millisecond muscle adjustments required for a move if you had to think about them consciously. But muscle memory can be a two edged sword.

Every so often you'll end up at the wrong end of a spill without a way to brace yourself against injury. Or you *won't* fall when you should have, and as a result you'll put too much stress on a body part that wasn't expecting it. A broken bone is a rare occurrence, but sprained muscles and torn ligaments are unfortunately all too common. I don't know any junior level skater who hasn't suffered through such an injury at least once.

So say you're injured. Sigh. What do you do? A sports injury clinic and rehab, crutches for a while, dear sympathy from your fellow skaters. This is just the least irksome part.

During that epoch while you're not skating your body slowly changes. You mature some, you put on weight in various places, and your muscle strength compensates for your injury through your daily activities. By the time you fully heal and are ready to retake the ice you are physically a different person.

And this is truly the demonic aspect of an injury, the bitter vengeance of muscle memory. As you return to the ice picking up where you left off, your automatic memory no longer matches and is inappropriate to your presently healed body. Sadly nothing is more frustrating: after all that careful rehab you have not only lost a year's worth of skill but also the path for moving forward.

Unlike most other sports, anything more serious than a moderate injury during the formative growth-years of a skater's career nearly always ends it.