- 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.

- respect

I distinguish the sport of ice skating from the exercise of -watching- ice skating. The two are completely, distinctly different. My daughter skates; indeed she is in love with the sport of skating. She buys knickknacks from the events, she knows all of the famous skaters, she reads about skating, and eats, breathes and lives the sport. Me though, I just watch.

When I happened across ice skating as a kid, say because it was filler on "Wide World of Sports" (in between two things that I /did/ want to watch) the whole thing left me unmoved. Ladies were gliding around gracefully but certainly not in any way particularly inventive, say from a modern jazz dance perspective. It didn't seem to really be art. Occasionally a pairs routine might interest me due to the rather remarkable synchronization aspects of it more than anything.

Mostly though it was interesting to watch as a curiosity, as something to be slightly diversionary. Why did some of the skaters appear so clumsy and unable to do what they were attempting? I mean geesh, how hard could it be?

I know precisely when I fell in love with watching ice skating: when my daughter started doing laybacks. Always one of the more gracefully entertaining things to watch, the trouble my daughter was having getting any kind of technique on the matter left me bewildered. After examining her for a half hour session I figured out what was uniquely difficult about the maneuver: it's a question of angular momentum and torque versus moment translation.

In other words, spinning in an L shape causes unequal forces of stress on each lateral side of the body. This doesn't seem obvious from the outset, but it was clear that my daughter (along with the other beginners) was tightening one side of her dorsal muscles more than the other, and hence was short of laying back with her shoulders flat parallel to the ice.

Based solely upon her feelings, her own sensations, she /thought/ that she was flat back with shoulders equidistant to the ice. It took the video recorder to convince her otherwise. To employ some illustrative thought direction I told her to imagine herself with her leading shoulder slicing back through water.

This process taught me that the physics of the moves is not straightforward, and furthermore that the skater's perception is quite different than the audience's.

Out of curiosity I asked my daughter what she saw while she was doing her spins. She said "mostly a blur." She said that she could keep relative track of where she was in the rink by noticing some particular object as she was spinning, say the blue line of the hockey rink (the offsides marker), a member of the audience wearing an unusually brightly colored jacket, or a "spotter" (a friend standing on the ice).

As I watched her do more complicated moves I recognized that to accomplish them in a manner that was graceful to the audience, she had to learn contortions and sequences of muscle activity that basically don't make sense in any other environment.

This was the defining moment for me; after layback training I suddenly recognized the incredible amount of practice and sublime, intricately-timed adjustments my daughter made to arrive at such movements. Now I have nearly infinite respect for a skater on the ice who can actually perform something dynamic and graceful, perfectly attuned to the audience.

(-- repost --)

- watch

Sometimes I watch skating as a parent, sometimes as an audience member, and sometimes as a judge. The effect is as different as drinking tea, soda, or hot cocoa.

The tea of observation is to watch skating as a judge. This requires discipline, strict methodological routine, and intense self awareness. The simple knowledge that you must "score" a skater imposes a fabric of criticality before your eyes. You zoom in to minutiae, the very discreet, skate edges, jump rotations and checks, verticals and parallels.

You are so attuned to the performance that you don't dare drop your eyes to the score or otherwise allow your focus to stray, lest you miss an important fault. Internally you store a fast growing list of accomplishments, likes, and errors. When the skater finishes you then immediately dump your mental recording into the scoresheet. As you are in the midst of this the next skater takes the ice, waiting for you to finish. You get about a five second breather as she cues up before you renew this process all over again.

Watching as an audience member you get to savor and enjoy the expressiveness of each performance. You signal the level of your appreciation after each skate by your vigorous (or polite) applause, and chat with friends during or in-between the performances. This is the hot cocoa of watching; it is fun and relaxing. You can get up in between skaters and grab a treat or step outside to warm up a bit.

Watching as a parent however is another matter entirely. You are both courteous and curious as you observe the other competitors, but your heart is always with your daughter. Even though you can't see her you can sense her warming up off ice. When they announce her name your heart leaps into your throat. As she skates to center ice and poses, pride tickles your tongue. Your heart skips a beat with every slip of balance, and when she nails a jump you clench your fist and go "yeah."

Observing your daughter skate is the soda pop of watching: sometimes the soda goes down the wrong pipe and makes you cough, other times the fizzy bubbles shoot straight up and tickle your nose. It's never a dull moment.

- ouch

Well as a parent you'll watch all levels of skaters with various skills; some possess a more consistently stable set of skills than others. Regardless, small unfortunate things can still happen on the ice: a blade can nick a hole that waits there in ambush, or a stray sequin can wedge into a micro crevice and patiently skulk as a tripwire.

Skaters fall on the ice all the time of course. When they are little the shorter distance to the ice and a child's mass combines to mitigate any risk. As skaters grow and mature however, a fall can become rather serious.

I was in the audience at a local competition in Burbank. We were around midway through the second day, a Sunday, and the adult ladies (silver) were skating their free skate.

An average build, 5 foot 6 brunette takes the ice, poses. The music starts and she glides with grace and experience. A split jump, some light footwork, a toe loop. Then a nice spiral with a small bit of shimmy. Now a wide spread eagle sliding back, arms graceful. Then she three turns, toe loops, approaches the audience side of the rink, Axel.

But something cocks up her landing, and she suddenly strikes the ice flat or her side like a fifty kilo sack of potatoes. The audience gasps. She gives a tight grimace, but stays absolutely motionless. Ten seconds pass. The audience is numbingly quiet. The music continues on for a few more seconds, then the booth fades the music. Another small tight grimace, still no movement.

Is she conscious? Did she break something? Another twenty seconds pass. Everyone in the rink seems frozen in a sepia photograph of shared pain, worry, and lost dreams. Something needs to happen. "Help her," somebody yells from the stands. The audience murmurs, a couple people stand. Why doesn't anybody help?

Another thirty seconds pass as she lies motionless on the ice. We see her thinking and crying inside, her whole skating dream is over. We have all just witnessed the end of a young lady's career. We are somber and concerned at the same time. Silently, many of us are praying. The passing seconds each seem like minutes. A door in the boards opens and a younger skater and a rink employee step onto the ice, the skater rushing in a beeline to the downed gal, the rink employee following reluctantly lagging behind.

The downed skater now moves, whimpers, presses herself up sideways on one arm, grimaces hard again. Her friend reaches her and whispers something in her ear, then puts her ear up next to the panting injured skater. Half the rink is crying. The rink employee reaches the downed skater, kneels and asks her some questions. He places one of her arms over his shoulder, and she lets out a small painful gasp as they stand together.

She holds one leg slightly up and glides on her other skate as the employee and her friend propel her to the boards. The audience stands, both applauding and crying. We are applauding for all the years she has skated, for her entire life. The injured skater exits the ice and sits on a bench, her mother rushing over.

The announcer calls out the next skater, a smaller blonde gal. She skates out to center ice, blinks back some tears, and poses.

- balance

It's a curiously entrancing dynamic, watching a coach teach the seven year old gals to skate backward along the center ice circle. The coach already has years upon years of her customary sense of centering and balance, but the seven year olds are cronked between their desire for the same grace as the coach and responding to their own internal millisecond body signals of muscular imbalance.

The coach focuses on teaching them arm position and yet their natural instinct is to use their arms (rather than their trunk muscles) for balance. Maybe that's the first unusual thing to observe when the skaters are just starting out: the sport generally requires arms out, or arms posed, whereas from infancy the natural inclination is to lift your right arm in immediate response to an unexpected body tilt to the left.

As if keeping balanced on one foot over an eighth inch wide blade of steel isn't already hard enough, we ask the young skaters to furthermore ignore using their natural tendency for having their arms help them balance!