- unpaired

I'd imagine a solo male figure skater faces a constant challenge dealing with the female skaters. As I watch the rink freestyles it's a bit subtle (but also clearly obvious) that many female skaters wish they could transition over to dance skating. They'd like a pair partner.

I would guess perhaps seven times more females than males figure skate; due to this highly skewed ratio the limiting factor of forming a pair is always how to find a guy.

All a guy has to do is smile at a gal and she'll inquire if he'd like to try skating with her. From what I've read a fair number of the accomplished male skaters tend to end up being brats, as they can pretty much dictate their relationship with their female partner. If they dislike her other good female skaters are a dime a dozen.

This implies that if a gentleman artist wishes to persist as solo he has to present a rather aloof front (while he's practicing anyway). Or more typically by the time he's eight years old or so he internalizes a pat set of answers, shrugs, and responses to all the standard female inquiries.

It takes exceptional single-minded focus to be a solo male figure skater.

- skate personality stew

Many of the young teen ladies at the rink get torn between their art and their desires to achieve certain technical aspects of their performance. This conflict seems to span four dimensions. On one axis you have the battle toward artistic expression, on another vector you get the strivings for technical accomplishments, on the third axis you have the whole issue of body shape, and finally you encounter the issue of fitting in with society's expectations for a young lady (at their age mostly their parents' expectations, but there can also be peer "drama" here as well). It is a rather complicated formula of flavors, and the most successful skaters have a lot on their plate.

How does the mixing and matching of forces create the personality of the skater? The big popular shows with hundreds and thousands of viewers -- the finals that you see on TV -- really don't do anything for the skaters. It is art of course, and it is a performance with all of the inherent issues of performance-art. But it is too big and noisy for the skaters to gain much critical value out of the process for themselves.

The small practice sessions though (the club events in front of the parents) are really where learning and social processes transpire. For one thing, the club events are small enough that the skaters can pay attention to the thoughts of the audience. They get immediate feedback about the impact of their performance. But more important is the peculiar characteristic of the audience itself: these observers see hours upon hours upon hours of skating. They know every move and they pay attention to the flexing of every muscle and the impact of every jump on each joint and bone. They are not easily impressed and they aren't distracted much by costuming flash... they comprehend the amount of effort and practice that goes into each and every move. And they all have the skaters' best interests at heart.

How the skater interacts with this smaller audience then influences her choices, which then determines her path. Each skater faces a choice of focus between art and technical merit. It isn't exactly a trade-off one-for-one; it is possible to advance both (and in fact the best skaters do advance both). At the middling stage though -- that point where a skater has reasonable control of her body, a fair number of moves and skills, and some experience performing on the ice -- you quickly see that a skater tends to drift toward one seasoning or another.

They can drift toward the flavor of being technically competitive, where they battle each other to see who can spin the fastest or do the most complicated laybacks or be the first to land a triple Axel consistently. Or they can drift to the aroma of showmanship, where they provide graceful entertainment to the audience.

Sometimes a gal is "pre-selected" for the competitive bent, either by her body build or by the influence of her parents. The more robust girls -- the large-boned -- have natural impediments to achieving much of the technical expectations. And yet they often are adequately compensated by being blessed with a certain amount of grace and artistic expression. Some of the more lankly gals don't have a lot of grace, but their physics allow them superior technical ease.

So all in all it’s a big complicated stew.

- discomfort

I suppose it shouldn't come as any surprise, but like any elite athlete a skater has to put up with a considerable amount of discomfort. It's not just the demands of physical exertion under the duress of awkward postures and strange forces. It's not just cold feet hours inside of those darn boots. It's not even the bumps and bruises from an unforgiving ice. Or the early practice hours, dramatic stress, or clique snubs.

The real discomfort is that skating is strangely isolational. Much like say a boxer, when you're away from your coach you are in a room with people you see all the time, but you are mostly practicing alone.

It's not a lonesome activity however. In fact quite the opposite. When you're in a classroom with fifty students you get most of your thoughts to yourself, as the constantly changing linkages scatters your love. When you're in a room with just a friend however, your love beams concentrate on each other and you become locked into mutual attention, without escape.

Skating practice is like that, and hence the discomfort. Yep, at the rink everyone knows what everyone thinks about everybody else.

- packing

After the tumult of the practice, the falls, the chatting, the drama, the bruises, an advancement or two, the deep creeping exhaustion finally overcomes the skater and the practice quietly dissolves to an end.

A couple of steps on the rubberized floor padding, a final stretch or two, grab the skate guards off the boards, and plop down on the bench with a sigh. Open the bag and take out the towel, dry the blades, remove the skates, dry some more, slip on the soakers, set the skates into the bag.

Squeeze and massage the toes.

Behind you the Zamboni starts its grinding around the outer edges of the ice. Put on your tennis shoes, check that you have everything, zip up the bag, a couple more stretches, go pay the coach, chat a bit, see you next time.

The winding down is as much a part of the experience as clearing before the hockey spirits take over.

- personality

When you saunter into any rink right off the bat you field the sliding scale of personalities. Some gals are clearly here for socializing and team spirit. They hang out by the boards, frequently skate adjacent to their friends, and even when skating alone seem to always have an eye on what somebody else is doing. They are the gals that are here to "perform," glittered up and in costume. They grab your love. These are the skaters that attend all the weekend show scrimmages, the group practice sessions. If they get really good they may end up in a traveling ice show and even make a little money in the process. They are the ice entertainers.

On the other end of the spectrum you'll catch the gals that skate alone. They occasionally chat at the dashers but mostly they focus on personal achievement. Instead of weekend group scrimmages, they spend the early part of every weekday morning at a freestyle session with half a dozen of their peers in shared isolation. They gladly accept your love and adore you for it. These are the athletes. If they get really good they may travel with a parent to distant competitions, but aside from the very top one or two national skaters, nobody makes any money at competitive skating. These are the soul inspirers.

- shoulders

If you have gathered your only experience of figure skating from watching TV, you would naturally assume that the "arms up" pose of the skaters is an inherent consequence of the tradition of poise and balance. It just seems to come instinctively to a skater.

So now get up from your computer, stand in the privacy of your own living room, and hold your arms up for three minutes. It's a pain but not impossible. Rest a few minutes and do it again. Rest, and then again. Repeat twenty times.

There now you have just performed the arm and shoulder portion of a freestyle practice session.

Mind you I have always appreciated the graceful athleticism of figure skaters, but it wasn't until I was the parent of a skating student that I recognized half of the strenuous challenge to the sport prevails from the shoulders.

- the practice life

It's a freestyle: I sit in the stands and concentrate on writing and staying "small" and inconspicuous. Freestyles are an intense combination of spunk and spiritual expression. These are the serious skaters, the ones who are working on a career. There is maybe a half dozen of them on the ice, and unlike a competition where they are careful, graceful, and showy, the freestyle is a lot of work and "pushing the envelope".

Every couple of minutes somebody falls on the ice; not seriously though, since they are all accustomed to falling. They attempt jumps that they are just working on, more spins than they would have done before, or an entrance move that they are just learning. They concentrate on their center-of-gravity and watch and control their body as gravity, forward velocity, and angular momentum pull at their limbs.

Learning is painful and is part of the process. A new attempt, the center of gravity behaving unexpectedly: a hip bounces on the ice. Up immediately again for another try with a slight shift in approach this time.

When you watch a competition you are seeing the moves that the skaters already know. When you are watching a freestyle though you are seeing the moves that they are just discovering. The difference is like that between ordering the steak tartare off of the restaurant menu versus visiting a friend for dinner where they just open the refrigerator to see what they have so they can "throw something together." In the first case you'll get a polished presentation of a tried-and-true creation, but the second case is quite a bit more interesting.

But there is more happening here -- it is that subtle act of creative destruction, the same that you might witness in an office of computer programmers or at the job site of construction workers. They are building something, they are struggling with their craft, they are moving through creative space and the rigors of the medium to reach the objective that they visualize. They are illuminating the path that leads to their own future.

- continuity

The top-level men skaters (much more than the women) exhibit a certain nonchalance in their practice sessions. A fair amount of this is due to the greater security in their relative positions, due to the general paucity of male skaters overall. They don't feel the pressure to always be "on" to impress people. Or to put it differently, their competitive bent is more driven by a desire to be kick-ass-best rather than a wish to "impress." They are more inwardly competitive than outwardly competitive.

Also their informality is partly a show of independence: a desire to break free from the artificial nature of imposed "show timings" and space allocations that can happen in the practice sessions.

A side effect of this is that men are much more focused on visualization and individual move skills, rather than program continuity. Mostly this is because -- having a man's brain -- they know without a doubt that they can assemble the pieces together under pressure when the time comes. It's an interesting psychological difference between the sexes that reflects directly in the practice of the sport.

After chatting about this a bit with my daughter we realized an unintended residual affect: in actual competition most men's programs tend to be weak at the end. This is due to the men failing to establish enough stamina, since they don't continually skate their programs all the way through during the practice sessions.