I was skating hard and the Covid interrupted, well, everything. After Covid I had a hard time picking up skating again because of boots problems, I actually almost gave up.... Then, I skated on and off. Whenever I picked up the skating again I had to go through a painful phase of building muscles. I also couldn't reach my coach because of heavy traffic during construction on expressway. I had no structure in my skating week or sessions, I've got demotivated, and got busy with other things.
But I figured out basically all of these!
-The boots. I needed tighter, lower volume, boots and none of the four acclaimed boot fitters could not figure out a model to do that, including a custom boot, I bough in desperation on ebay, a half size too small and stretched the tip of one of the boots that felt too small. I have to keep stretching it weekly and it is not as tight as mi old boots, but it works! I still skate with temporary screws, I hope I can have the mounting finished this coming week.
-The building of the muscles. I am hyper mobile and so, my muscles get tired easier than regular people. I figured out after studying all kind of articles that I should not skate too hard when I'm building muscles. If I overwork the muscles, they get too damaged, I am in too much pain, and they need a long time to recover, like a full week, and they don't get the chance to build, and the following week I'm back to square one. Instead, I have to skate just to the point of feeling tired, then I can skate after 2 days, or even the next day and in couple of weeks I have some improvement!
- Coach. The expressway in my area is under construction and the traffic made it unrealistic for me to go to the rinks where my coach teaches, what it used to be a 35-40 minutes drive is now an hour and a half. I just found a coach at 20 minutes away, and my old coach was her coach back in the day, so there is some continuity there. I will still see my old coach whenever I can find the time, but now I can count on continuous instruction.
- Structure, motivation and goals. Having a coach gives some structure to my skating week and makes me skate harder as I have somebody to show my progress.
- Ice time. While floating around in between rinks, I ended up going more to a new rink that is very close to my house, just 10 minutes. It is the training rink (with two surfaces) of the big city hockey team. I tried it when it first opened, but they had unreliable schedule. Now, they figured it out better, and they have freestyle ice and public skate almost every day.
My plan for the next months is, of course, to test the TenFox.
BUT... my main goal is now: skating longevity, I want to build a balanced practice, a more uniform effort. When I used to skate hard in the past, before covid, I used to yo-yo in between feeling motivated to progress and test, and frustrated by any adverse condition, and even bored to stick to working on the same skills. So the bigger plan is to pay attention on the effort towards progress versus the enjoyment I get from skating day by day.
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