- thighs

I mentioned in another post the importance of weight resistance work for building up your shoulders and back, and situps for your stomach. But this post is mostly speculative; I rather sense that weight training for the thighs makes such a large impact on your skating that I am worried the change might throw you for too large of an adjustment.

Naturally your thighs have more to do with your jumps than any other part of your body. But due to the relative percentage of their mass to your total body weight, and the movable action of your hips, a change in the mass of your thighs can have a radical impact to your spins and axels.

Heavier more muscular thighs increase the height of your jumps, and they also lower your center of gravity, which reduces precession when you spin (hence helping you land your jumps). Heavier thighs however also decrease your torque, slowing your rate of rotation.

Adjusting to such a dynamic and varied change is a significant chore. I suppose my general recommendation would be to definitely check to get your coach's opinion first, and definitely proceed in a very measured and consistent routine so as not to overwhelm your ability to adjust your physics. I would love to hear comments from skaters about their thigh-training routine, and how it affects them.

- 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.

- the center

Once a young skater gets the sense of how her blades react to the ice, how her ankles transfer her intentions, once she internalizes standing and movement, her awareness gently and gradually goes to her center. It isn't long before she realizes that about seventy percent of skating consists of managing her center of gravity.

Abstract concepts of physics regarding motion, momentum, acceleration, precession, centrifugal forces, and torque suddenly clarify into a hard reality.

How a growing competitive skater envisions and manages her center of gravity reflects outwardly as the foundation of her skating style. If she wrestles the cg she appears to be unsure and unsteady. If she lugs her cg around she appears ungraceful. If she compensates for her cg's movement autonomously then she appears to be flippant. If she over-manages her cg however then she appears to be too rigid.

There is a confident and playful way to manage your center of gravity; doing so on the ice whilst the spin and the jump requires years of practice.

- thoughts on scoring

Way back in 2011 my daughter and I had a conversation about the (then) new ISU scoring. She chatted more about details at the same time that she was sounding me out for larger philosophical issues, and I was propounding a strictly performance and attitude rating, arguing that the scoring doesn't particularly matter one way or another from the perspective of souls.

We reached a bit of a middle ground where I argued that what ISU is trying to achieve is to create a certain kind of "environment", something in the best interest of the sport in the long run. I caution that we need to be careful that we don't set up false objectives: we run the risk of creating a system that coaches "coach" to, in the same manner that teachers sometimes teach skills to score highly on the SAT rather than to develop students who are most competent at learning on their own.

I also brought up the possibility of computers doing the scoring. I said that it would be unreasonable to expect a computer to rate the /artistic/ abilities of a skater, their expressions, their performance, their joy. But conceivably a sufficiently smart and environment-aware computer (visual recognition, music listening) could determine the "technical" merits of a skating program, after sufficient training.

So what do you think? Should scoring create wiry ladies who can quintuple Axel? Or should it create spellbinding performances?

- sand

When you are on the ice for hours at a time, you begin to appreciate the minuscule and subtle differences of where your feet contact this piece of Earth, this artificial layer you triage with steel blades and a millimeter of meltwater. Ice conditions vary from rink to rink and even within the same rink, depending on the weather outside, the humidity management, and how "thick" they are resurfacing.

Ice can feel "fast" or "slow", hard or soft, springy or deadening. Not to mention rough, smooth, slick, bumpy, and even wavy. Most rinks have an inconsistent surface at any given instant due to the uneven wear in the surface or the inconsistent cooling underneath it. I've even been in a couple rinks with skylights where the sun's path across the ice leaves a trail of slush.

But wait, there's more. Just a few inches under your feet lies the substrate, what the ice is built upon. Every decade or so a rink will completely resurface; if you ever get the chance don't miss the opportunity to watch this. The whole process can take a month.

After they turn off the freezer pipes and let the ice melt, draining and mopping off the water, they will bring in the shovels and rakes and remove the paint. Then you have freezer pipes under a couple inches of sand (some of it quite wet now, depending on the condition of the prior paint). Lift out the pipes, then bring in the mini bulldozer to scoop up the sand and the gravel under that. Now you are left with a big empty building.

Of course things are a little trickier when you get ready to build the ice up again in reverse. Is all the new gravel and sand level and equally tamped down? Are all the pipes flowing leak-free? Is the paint dry yet? Is the new water clean? It turns out that what determines most of the ice's personality you don't even get to see: you are skating on gravel, sand, and paint.