We Don't Just Excel, We Axel

This story comes courtesy of a conversation I had with one of the excellent, lovely, talented, senior-level ice dancers that is now turning his hand towards coaching at our rink. Why include so many praising adjectives about this wonderful young man? Well, because of him, I now know that I have achieved a degree of notoriety at the rink, and I LOVE  that fact. Gaining notoriety means I'm now officially a badass, right? I'm well known at my rink for throwing myself into the jumping aspect of free skating with rather more zeal than is strictly necessary at my level of learning - you could say that in my quest for bigger and better then I compensate for a lack of skill with misguided effort. Scenes of me smashing into the ice are relatively common, so I often hear jokes from my friends and the rink staff about how I'm going to injure myself next. I haven't done any real damage to myself until relatively recently , but no need to worry about that! Not to be deter...

I tend to make something of an effort to speak to some of the new skaters on the rink basically because it seems to be a general rink tradition that everyone's just so friendly to everyone else on the rink. To that end, I recently got talking with a new guy in the beginners' class. That's right, alert reader, a new guy , which, as will be no surprise to ice skating regulars, is a rare thing, made rarer still by the fact he's in his 20s, like me. You see -  clears throat -  LEGEND HAS IT... For every generation of skating learners (adult or otherwise) there is born just one male into the flock of women (heterosexual men take note of this gender imbalance) . It has been this way since the dawn of time and we must nurture these rare adult males who might go on to be a lonely female's ice dance partner, or perhaps they will one day perform such adult free skating wonders as the double Axel, double to--- "Yeh, so, I'm learning in secret because my missus pla...