- lucky

Something is messed up with the way we plan our practice and our competing. In a word, we somehow expect to be lucky. No one in their right mind plans a major endeavor under the assumption that everything will click just so, and yet as I watch the gals practice their programs that is exactly their approach.

Should you really be pushing yourself to the limits of your skills in your standard competition program? I don't think so; if you can only land a jump half the time in practice then how do you expect to land it when you are under stress and under the eyes of the audience and the judges?

I think you should skate the jumps you already are quite comfortable with; in other words your regular program should be easy, and slightly less than you can actually perfectly accomplish on a lucky day.

- outside

Skating can be about projecting an imagination. This can happen two distinct ways however. Call the first way "from the inside" and the second way "from the outside."

From the Inside everything happens in your head, you have an idea of what you are creating and sharing that runs through your mind as you practice, and you share this same thing when you skate in front of an audience. It is a Performance.

Imagination from the Outside is different entirely. When you are practicing with your imagination outside, you have an idea, a template for what you wish to communicate, but it isn't cast in stone and it changes depending on the mood and who is watching. You become both connected and interacting with your environment and the spirits around you.

Skating with your imagination on the Outside is more then a performance: it is a Show.

- classical

I am going to go way out on a limb and propose that generally, almost without exception, you should figure skate to classical music. You can once in a while, very occasionally, skate a popular song for a novelty program or in a show. But skating is such serious work that only classical music does it justice.

Classical music has Sweep, skating has Sweep. Classical music has Drama, skating has Drama. Classical music has sublime intricacy. Skating has sublime intricacy. Skating and classical music were just meant to go together.

- the snap point

My daughter skates one of the best programs of her career and finishes fifth (out of seven). The judging was rather inconsistent: one judge rated her 3rd, one 7th, but the rest were generally middle ranges. I take the positive tack though: that makes her an average pre-preliminary, which I consider quite an accomplishment by and of itself.

I worry that she maybe felt a bit embarrassed by her placement, although I'm much prouder of her than she realizes. She will likely suffer a bit of soul searching, but I suspect her love of the sport will see her through. It's a long road to hoe, and the only thing that really matters after all these years is that she keeps making incremental improvements. So far that seems to be her direction, so that is all I ask, really.

And that is also what creates an artist: the ability to self-critique and review your own progress in the long run.

This is a peculiar odd sticky-point for me... by all rights, even though /I/ am aware of her progress, she needs to actualize the timeline and see her path for herself. I can support her, but it is not my place to make these realizations for her.

- breaking free

When I watch an instructor teach, she looks at the present capabilities of her student, both physically and stylistically, and then she mentally chooses a reasonable target for a near-term objective that is reachable along the pathway of what she can ultimately expect from her skater. She then proposes: do "this," or "try it this way."

The skater tends to imbue from these instructions that "this" is the "correct" way to perform a particular move, whereas the coach's intentions may actually be to introduce a physical counter-action to inhibit something the skater is misperforming.

The coach is looking for a path to final perfection. The path itself, however, is not the goal. At some point the skater has to break free of the teaching.

At some point the skater needs to mentally internalize the actual goal, the objected and desired physical, stylistic, and performance effect, and then use all of her accumulated knowledge to create her own way of accomplishing it. She needs to blaze her own path.

The skater never stops learning but after a while she does stop being a student. And after a while her coach becomes less of a teacher and more of a mentor.