Test: Bronze Dances (Willow Waltz)

I gave myself an early Christmas present and passed the Willow Waltz on December 23rd. Here is the description of the dance written as I was learning it.This Is the second of the Bronze Pattern dances I tested. The first one is the Hickory Hoedown, that I passes in January. As I was mentioning in a post before, this was a lower key testing session covering dances just up to Bronze Dances. I tested in this session before and I felt less intimidated as there were younger skaters (kids) that weren't stronger skaters than me, testing mostly Preliminary and Pre-Bronze Dances.

Not this time... There were 3 groups of skaters testing Bronze. At my rink kids have to take Preliminary and Pre-Bronze Dances as prerequisite to be in the syncro teams. So they do them while quite young usually in group classes. Then, the majority of them lose interest in dance, as they consider it boring. They come back to it after years, as teenagers, either to improve their presentation in Freestyle, or because they get stuck in Freestyle, or to test towards achieving the Gold medal to put in their collage applications. And that's why there were lots of strong skaters (way stronger then me) on this session, testing Bronze as me.

The weeks before the test I was working into building confidence and presenting. As I was hurt in March and lasted 6 months, I couldn't work on power and extension so I think that made me look a little hesitant. But I felt good and confident the day of the test. Now the test was at 6 pm and while I wasn't nervous I was a little tired from all this holiday preparations. I went half an hour earlier and skated on a public session for 15 minutes. It was crowded and the ice was bad but I've got my knees and ankles soft and I put in some 3 turns and the mohawk. As our session began I found out I was in the first group.

As I stepped on the ice I found myself holding my breath as the teenagers started to warm up fast as the wind. They were all doing the power crossovers. My first thought was "Don't get intimidated...." but as I was watching them, I realized "I can do this...". This power crossovers pattern I prepare for my MITF test and my coach said it's good enough to test, so I let myself go as fast as they went, well, maybe not as fast as them, but fast. And I felt great! Then I warmed up my backward skating as I couldn't in the public session. Then, I was ready to put a solo pattern in and that felt good. There was no music playing, maybe it was for the best, why?, read here. And here is my solo warm up.

As the waltz music was playing my coach partnered me and that felt good too. I was the second one to test. I wasn't nervous, maybe a little hyper. While waiting for the music my coach cracked a joke (like on the previous tests) to relax me. You can see me laughing just before starting (look at my left shoulder). I couldn't think of much during the test, usually, during practices, I could. I was on autopilot and before I knew it the 2 patterns were done. My coach said good job and ran to his next student. I couldn't think of anything that I did wrong. I thought it's gonna be a matter of having shown enough power, as I test standard not adult track. When I've got the test form the only suggestion from the judge was to extend the extensions. I passed with one point over the passing average.  I'll take it!