Skating was AWFUL this morning. Well, actually the freestyle session was delicious. Mostly because I ate a cinnamon roll instead of skating. (And I wonder why Kevin is doing so much better losing weight on Slim Fast than I am.)
I got there at 8:00 and there was about 3 feet of clean ice in front of the zamboni door. The other adult skaters are peering into the ice rink through the zam door. A few kids are skating, but most are milling about the lobby. The ice looks HORRIBLE. It is clearly remnants of a crowded Friday night public session, at least there are no pock marks in the lutz corner.
The zam honks! Woo! Our savior. He is going to scrape the ice (sucks for the 7:00 lesson group...) He gets on the ice, and goes about 1/2 of the way around the outside edge, then the ice stops getting smoother. UGH.
So I lace up my skates, and decide, if anything, maybe I can spin in place. The two adults who had been checking the ice out decide to go to Panera- quite a few kids call it quits. A few more step onto the ice, and Burton starts up lessons. I do a few laps, and decide even the "good" ice sucks. Another adult takes my suggestion and spins, hugging the wall, on the only clear ice.
At 8:45 I tell myself "you test in two weeks- go do backspins" so I do. About 10 minutes of backspins, anda few scratch spins. The ice is so bumpy, they are pretty awful. At 9:00 the zamboni horn honks again. YAY! It is fixed. (Also deja vu to the day I sprained my wrist- bad freestyle ice, scraped for LTS).
He does the first lap- the ice is smoothing behind him. He does the second lap- it is looking nice. He goes for the third. Nope, that is ugly ice left in the wake. The zamboni retreats again.
We do LTS with three stripes of good ice alternating two stripes of horrible ice. The bad ice is dirty too- there was broomball the night before, so tennis shoes have tracked all kinds of debris up there.
LTS was a disaster. Carson asked us to do 3 laps to start, and I was terrified. In addition to worrying about awful ice (it was like skating on asphalt it was so bumpy) the first session has gotten really crowded. It used to be Burton's huge class, 2 adults, and then the 3 of us in freestyle. Now it is Burton's huge class, 2-5 adults, 3 freestyle, Carlos has a class of about 8 and Taylor has a class about 8- I would guess those are Basic 7-Freestyle 1 by level, but skills are lower than that, and then the 3 axel-plus kids warm up during this time. The crowds, combined with trying to stay on good ice made it just horrifying. The only thing that went well was loops, because those don't take much space. We did waltz jump-toe loops and it was just like "where"- there were just people EVERYWHERE.
So test is in two weeks. I'm going to do my best, but I think it will likely be a practice test. That's okay- quad cities in the summer is another shot.
Early Autumn
1 month ago
3 comments:
I feel your pain. The local minor league hockey team has been practicing at my rink every morning for the past two weeks. The zamboni has been working, but it goes over the ice 3 times every morning and it is still bad.
Ugh, know what you mean about poor floor conditions... We had a competition this morning, but there was a roller derby bout at the rink last night. Those derby girls like to oil up their skin so they slide when they fall, but this gets oil on the floor and makes it slicker than snott. We had one event (a dance event!) where all of the skaters fell at least twice because they slid through the grease.
One nice thing about roller is we don't have to deal with broken Zambonis... on the other hand, once our floors get damaged they stay that way for a long time and you just have to deal with it.
Oh my goodness! That is awful you had to skate on a greased floor. That just seems wrong that they can't clean that someway.
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