Shifting in my office chair, I prepared to put the finishing touches on a focus group report that would be provided to our client. As my weight redistributed finding a more comfortable equilibrium to complete the task, various sheets of notepaper that had been resting in my lap slid to the floor, littering the drab carpet under my feet. I bent over to gather the papers and placed them on the desk. As I moved, my sweater bunched around my waist. My hands instinctively moved to rearrange the folds of fabric. Taking the knit in hand, my palm rested on my belly. I had never had a belly before. Sure enough, a little abdominal pot protruded though my lightweight pants.
Exploring the contour of the outcropping, I lifted the sweater to examine the offensive region. To my horror, my gut filled the fabric so completely that my belly button could be clearly observed through the thin material of my elastic waist slacks. So apparent was its position and size, that I could have measured its diameter with a ruler and calculated the circumference of the cavity. My mother’s fear of my burgeoning mass now seemed like a self-fulfilling prophecy, not because I was skating, but because I had quit. In a moment of panic, I pulled the sweater down, as far as its fabric would stretch covering the offensive indentation. There in the middle of my abdomen stood a crater, the collapsed blowhole of a volcano, a hideous belly button caldera.
Not only had I essentially given up ice skating, I had replaced it with gourmet meals. Supposedly, newly married people can expect to gain twenty pounds each during their first year of marriage. Nesting encourages feeding. The woman explores her domestic skills, usually with the aide of a bevy of new appliances. The husband barbeques on summer evenings. When not indulging at home, the couple will go out for restaurant meals and social occasions. Two people who used to monitor their in-take and maintain a fitness regimen suddenly have a built-in eating partner and an excuse to skip the gym (or rink) in favor of more romantic activities.
I had to get my bulging anatomy back on the ice.
In November, once Max and I had been married for almost a year, I decided to salvage the remnants of my skating that had taken a sabbatical while I enjoyed the fairytale of a new marriage. At thirty-one years old, my body had started to look dowdy. I was eating too much and skating too little. Yes, I missed skating, but I had essentially abandoned the sport, mainly due to dissatisfaction with my coach and disgust with my own lack of progress. Staying home with my husband was more fulfilling. Weight gain ultimately drove me back to the rink, and I started skating about three times per week. After intermittently avoiding Orville and canceling lessons earlier in the year, I unwisely decided to give him another sincere chance. Basically, Orville was a likeable fellow. Perhaps my waning interest in skating had colored my perception of his attitude and teaching methodology. I decided to state my goals and needs clearly to reduce the probability of future misunderstandings.
I had not formulated a goal since my Arctic Circle adventures when I naively decided to learn the jumps up to and including the axel. Already seven years later, I had not achieved those objectives and seemed a long way from doing so, though Orville might have tried to persuade me otherwise. Why did I continue to skate with a coach whose opinion I apparently valued so little? If he thought I was ready for an axel, I should have worked in that direction entrusting my lesson time to his expert judgment. Frankly, I decided to give Orville another shot because Hansie’s rink offered no options that I deemed acceptable. I was not convinced of my axel readiness because I lacked the confidence to skate powerfully into any jump, and attempts at elementary footwork failed miserably. I believed this fundamental absence of basic skills not only precluded my worthiness for axel training, it essentially made the pursuit foolhardy and inappropriate. My immediate goals involved a return to the humble beginnings of skating, to edgework and stroking, turns, glides, and crossovers. I wanted to cover the ice like a real skater, not a hesitant thirty-something.
In the early nineties, the discipline of compulsory school figures had been eliminated from international competition and most rinks deleted patch sessions from their schedules. Figures provided skating’s foundation and gave the sport its name. The control necessary to carve precise figures into a patch of ice, overlaying one set of tracings atop the previous, required years of training and brought budding skaters into cold rinks before dawn to etch eights and serpentines silently onto a rectangle of unblemished ice. Since the early seventies, school figures counted for progressively less of the total score in competitions until they were eliminated completely in 1991.
Shortly thereafter, Moves in the Field were instated as a pseudo-replacement. Moves in the field are classic turns and edges performed in a freestyle context. Rather than skating movements on a figure eight, serpentine, or loop; they are executed as a set pattern utilizing (in most cases) the entire ice surface. Unlike compulsory dances, they are not performed to music. While moves are not part of Olympic track competitive events, they are required as test skills before a skater can attempt the corresponding freestyle level. The skaters most commonly seen on television are senior level athletes, meaning (in the United States) they have passed the “senior” moves in the field and freestyle tests. While other countries have different qualification requirements, many have adopted a version of moves in the field to promote basic skills competency among developing skaters. After deciding moves in the field would solve my problems, I presented Orville with a request for lessons.
My knowledge of moves was very limited, so I approached my instructor, innocently expecting him to guide me through these exercises. Instead, Orville taught me an array of mismatched dance skills, not even complete dances, which probably would have served me just as well as moves. His dance instruction did not start with a simple progressive or swing roll, but dove right into frighteningly advanced turns including a choctaw, which he insisted I do at speed cutting between two closely placed traffic cones. Maybe Orville did not understand the seriousness of my dilemma, the depth to which I needed remediation. I left the rink perplexed; second guessing Orry’s motives, communication skills, and knowledge of changes in the sport.
In retrospect, I doubt Orville knew the moves in the field; and, as a part-time instructor to recreational adult skaters, probably had little call for them. Instead of admitting he would have to check the rulebook, he forged ahead with substitute skills that were not what I wanted. Yet, this was not sufficient to make me ditch Orville and take my business elsewhere. I gave him another chance. And another. I stuck with the improvised dance skating, and admit that I did learn something from those lessons. I could do a good choctaw. I may not have had a counterclockwise three-turn to match, but I was encouraged nonetheless.
A happy marriage had basically made me a happy person. I tried to look for the positive side of my lessons with Orville, though I was not convinced of their worth. With Georgeanne singing his praises and none of the other adults complaining, I wondered if I was source of my own problem. An introspective person, I always tried to be fair. But my limits of tolerance for Orville’s questionable practices were nearing an end.
I wanted to revisit the stars I had learned at the Sacramento rink from a fellow adult skater. I had not worked on them and did not feel comfortable experimenting with such a flamboyant move at Hansie’s without the guidance of an instructor. So, I imprudently asked for Orville’s input. After stumbling through what I remembered of the other skater’s impromptu lesson, Orville demonstrated his own version. Stars are little more than toe assisted forward outside three-turns. A powerful skater can achieve the magnificent effect of a star series by concurrently dipping the torso and reaching the free leg high above horizontal with each three-turn. Performed at speed with strength and conviction, stars are dramatic elements that look far more advanced than they really are. Any skater who can do a three-turn and a decent camel spin can manage a rudimentary star series. The full effect comes with speed, which seems to be true of almost all skating skills.
Orville was a good skater. Whatever criticisms I may have had for him as a teacher, I could not deny his talent. Although what Orry demonstrated was not a star, at least not a modern rendition, he managed to make the improvised element look good. I mimicked the coach’s example and succeeded to his delight. Of course, I could not see what I was doing. Hansie’s did not offer videotaping and Orville never initiated this practice on his own. At the time, Orville’s version sufficiently impressed me into believing I was actually doing a star.
Although Georgeanne’s lessons rarely coincided with mine, she and Orry appeared on one of my free weekday mornings for a session. A couple of weeks had passed since my star lesson, and I continued to be satisfied with my progress. While practicing footwork at the end of Hansie’s tiny rink, I noticed Orville teaching Georgeanne “stars”. While stars are basically an easy move taken to extremes, poor Georgeanne did not possess one of the critical foundation skills to accommodate the addition of stars to her repertoire. She could not do a recognizable camel. The outstretched body position required for a camel makes the spin difficult to learn, and many adults are lucky to squeak out three slow, large revolutions. However, Georgeanne had not even attained this humble level of mastery.
First, I scorned Orville like a cheating boyfriend caught with another woman. He had taken my lesson and given it to Georgeanne, who clearly did not possess the background to appreciate it. Our star work had been a positive development in my professional relationship with Orville. It made me feel special and began to restore my confidence in him. It represented a new beginning for us. Clearing my jealous anger for long enough to actually observe the interaction between Orville and Georgeanne, I critically evaluated what he was teaching his student. Orry possessed the talent to make a squatting sit spin look decent, but Georgeanne did not. The coach demonstrated his novel “stars” and Georgeanne attempted to duplicate the maneuver.
The woman pushed into what appeared to be a typically adult camel foible. Her dip into position and free leg lift were poorly timed and forced. The body broke at the waist, almost collapsing under the pressure of her elevating unemployed leg. Initially, I thought I might have been mistaken and Orry was actually teaching Georgeanne how to do a camel spin. I hid my face behind a tissue and skated around absently, trying to watch from a discrete distance. The instructor persisted with another “star” demonstration. No, I could not excuse this mess as a camel lesson.
Finally, Georgeanne completed one ugly camel rotation, which might not have been shameful if a camel spin had been her intent. The turn concluded, she reached her free toe back and drew her body away from the previous center. This led to a toe-assisted three-turn and a step into another single revolution slovenly camel. I had to visually consume several of these things before I understood what was happening. Orville interpreted stars as a series of single-turn camel spins strung together by a pick-and-pull action similar to the vaulting mechanism of a flip jump. The coach himself possessed the agility and skill to disguise this hodgepodge as a legitimate element, which it certainly might have been if cleverly incorporated into program choreography. Whatever it was, it was definitely not a star. Orry apparently did not know (or remember) how to do a star, and concocted a substitute to placate his adult students.
I took a couple more lessons from Orville and cancelled a couple more. I never asked to work on stars again; preferring spins, basic jumps, and footwork. None of this consolation instruction furthered my skating abilities, but at least I had gotten back on the ice. And the gaping caldera eventually vanished from my abdomen.
I could count the skating sessions I had attended over the last few months on the fingers of one hand. While I may have missed skating itself, the freedom of gliding around a rink or unimpeded rotation on the sweet spot of a blade, I did not miss Orville. Nor did I miss Zach shouting “Heads up!”, and I certainly did not yearn for the pampered little ice princesses tossing me foul glances at evening sessions. I happily drove directly home after work, often going out for a relaxing dinner with my wonderful husband. However, I had not replaced skating with a beneficial exercise substitute.
Chapter 72 posted 5/8/03
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