HP #17 - Foot-based finagling
Usual disclaimer applies: this is an old event I'm recounting. See my first HP post for the full notes on these.
Background: Still around the month and a half mark in the 5-8 class by this point.
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"How about we give some choctaws a go?" David smiled broadly at his suggestion.
David was a fan of implementing "stretch and reach" goals for our class; he didn't call them that, but that's what they were. "Stretch & Reach" was (probably still is) a policy used in some UK school education to help indicate to kids what they had to do in their work in order to be working at a higher grade of competency than they currently were, or to indicate how they could go beyond what was required of the expected standard at their level.
Stretch and reach goals made sense in the 5-8 class as, broadly speaking, we'd all covered the 5-8 material even if we weren't doing it with any great skill, so, in the spirit of doing harder skills in order to make earlier ones easier, he sprinkled our sessions with moves that were beyond the skill level we were at.
In a previous session, our stretch and reach had been backward cross rolls (if you haven't read my previous post on forward cross rolls, you can find an exercise in that post to give you a feeling for what forward cross rolls are like. If you have read it then just take the same exercise and imagine stepping backwards instead of forwards).
Backward cross rolls, it turns out, are pretty hellish. Bringing your free foot round behind your already skating foot, transitioning onto it without really being able to see what you're doing, and then holding the backwards outside edge while generating momentum all at the same time is pretty insane. You can get started with them by just stepping your feet backwards in the correct pattern (just like with forward cross rolls) and you should eventually build momentum to start gliding. Watching our class was probably quite bizarre as we'd all stand in a circle around David and drift away from him at different paces as we clumsily practised stepping backwards. The best of us could begin to generate impetus from just stepping, so they could hold the glide for a bit; I was not one of those people. As much as I stepped then I just couldn't get momentum going with it for more than half a second - another one for later practice!
Choctaws were a similarly bizarre experience. Honestly, even to this day, I have only a vague idea what a choctaw really is. Without Googling it, I know it's one of the more complex two-foot turns, commonly used in ice dance. There are several variations of the choctaw, but I think one is where you do a forward inside edge glide on one foot and then transition to a backward outside edge on the other foot. I'd actually seen some ice dancers practising what I believe were these in a rather impressive fashion in the skate training sessions (it involved holding a pole out steady while doing the transition to ensure you kept facing in the same direction). Back in the world of 5-8 though and I think I may have managed one, but it was nothing like clean, more like very fiddly.
It was amazing to think that I hadn't already learned this by now, but there's an awful lot of foot-based finagling in ice skating!
Background: Still around the month and a half mark in the 5-8 class by this point.
-------------------------
"How about we give some choctaws a go?" David smiled broadly at his suggestion.
David was a fan of implementing "stretch and reach" goals for our class; he didn't call them that, but that's what they were. "Stretch & Reach" was (probably still is) a policy used in some UK school education to help indicate to kids what they had to do in their work in order to be working at a higher grade of competency than they currently were, or to indicate how they could go beyond what was required of the expected standard at their level.
Stretch and reach goals made sense in the 5-8 class as, broadly speaking, we'd all covered the 5-8 material even if we weren't doing it with any great skill, so, in the spirit of doing harder skills in order to make earlier ones easier, he sprinkled our sessions with moves that were beyond the skill level we were at.
In a previous session, our stretch and reach had been backward cross rolls (if you haven't read my previous post on forward cross rolls, you can find an exercise in that post to give you a feeling for what forward cross rolls are like. If you have read it then just take the same exercise and imagine stepping backwards instead of forwards).
Backward cross rolls, it turns out, are pretty hellish. Bringing your free foot round behind your already skating foot, transitioning onto it without really being able to see what you're doing, and then holding the backwards outside edge while generating momentum all at the same time is pretty insane. You can get started with them by just stepping your feet backwards in the correct pattern (just like with forward cross rolls) and you should eventually build momentum to start gliding. Watching our class was probably quite bizarre as we'd all stand in a circle around David and drift away from him at different paces as we clumsily practised stepping backwards. The best of us could begin to generate impetus from just stepping, so they could hold the glide for a bit; I was not one of those people. As much as I stepped then I just couldn't get momentum going with it for more than half a second - another one for later practice!
Choctaws were a similarly bizarre experience. Honestly, even to this day, I have only a vague idea what a choctaw really is. Without Googling it, I know it's one of the more complex two-foot turns, commonly used in ice dance. There are several variations of the choctaw, but I think one is where you do a forward inside edge glide on one foot and then transition to a backward outside edge on the other foot. I'd actually seen some ice dancers practising what I believe were these in a rather impressive fashion in the skate training sessions (it involved holding a pole out steady while doing the transition to ensure you kept facing in the same direction). Back in the world of 5-8 though and I think I may have managed one, but it was nothing like clean, more like very fiddly.
It was amazing to think that I hadn't already learned this by now, but there's an awful lot of foot-based finagling in ice skating!
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