About & Blog Goals

Well would you look at that? Another adult ice skating blog! This time round you're reading about a 20-something adult figure skater with side interests in PC & board gaming (neither of which will get much mention on here). This fearless squire started learning to figure skate in July 2016 and, aside from the standard adult struggles with mohawks, is hoping to joust in the arena of adult competitions at some point in the future. Let's hope this ends up more A Knight's Tale than Game of Thrones.

I'm rapidly losing my grasp of that narrative so let's abandon it in favour of some more details. When I started then I'd had no prior experience of figure skating (aside from the odd family or friend outing to a rink), but I tumbled into love with skating faster than I knew what to do with myself. This obsession inevitably led to reading about other adult skaters through their blogs, and since then I've consumed the entire post history of several blogs, many of them going back over five years!

And what did that addiction lead to? Well, you're reading it. Let's hope I can prove myself worthy of joining the esteemed skating bloggers that already populate the net and I hope you enjoy reading about my own experiences!

With that said, here're some goals for the blog:
  • I aim to blog beginner-friendly. I'm going to try and explain as much as I can where I can. I have family that read this and they'd like some technical explanation if just to know a bit more about what on earth's going on. This is absolutely an excuse for the fact I ramble a lot.
  • I aim to blog about the present. This goes without saying but we've all got those tales of daily laughter and disaster on the rink so I hope to get those in. This'll also include any random thoughts or concepts I want to discuss about this mad sport (it is mad).
  • I aim to blog about the past. I've written some of my posts about my early lessons and experiences to try and include some of my perspective as I remember it back then. I've marked these posts as "Historical Perspective", or "HP". One of the things I liked most about reading other blogs when I started skating was seeing how people felt when they were learning the basics like I was. It was nice to be able to relate my own progression with other peoples' so I hope I can provide some of that for others. It also gives you a view of the journey I've been on up until the present.
  • I aim to show what it's like being a male, younger adult learner starting from scratch. A lot of the other blogs I've read are people that have come back to skating after many years away or have taken it up much later in life. I've never done it before and it's unusual to have the time to cram in a hobby like figure skating when you're in your mid-20s, but I'm trying! Also, I only have to look at the training ice sessions at my local rink to know that there tends to be more women than men in this sport, at least in the UK, so I hope I can provide a bit of male perspective for everyone to enjoy (I've thrown myself onto the rink's surface enough times for everyone at my rink's amusement!)
  • I aim to show what it's like skating in the UK. The sad fact is the UK doesn't really have a connection with ice sports in the way that places like North America does. We tend to prefer football, rugby and one or two other sports, so things like figure skating fall a bit by the wayside. Drawback of this is that rinks are sadly closing, but, on the bright side, practice ice is damn cheap compared to what I've read about US ice rinks!
Now that's sorted... First up, how did a mid 20-something get mixed up in all this? I've written a post about just that, but if you want to get started from when I started lessons then click through to my first historical post and follow the numbers for the rest of the story.

Happy skating!

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