Turtle doves#

Sat, 11 Mar 2006 12:00:00 +0000

The first full day kicked off with a short lecture about the basics of skating technique - mostly useful as a way to learn the German for words like "setdown" and "push". Since it started raining during this, the planned skating exercise following was cancelled in favour of "imitation" - some form of dryland training including low walking, jumps, extended crouches in "skating position", etc. "I must be doing this wrong, it doesn't hurt enough", I was thinking (in retrospect I was wrong here: see later entries). We also had our assignment into groups: I'm in group 2 - along with all the other people with 1:20-1:30 marathon times.

In the afternoon, filming for the first video review session. This is quite cool: skate behind a minibus with a big mirror on the back (so you can see yourself) and a video camera mounted underneath it (so posterity can see you). That said, it was so short that I more or less forgot everything I should have been concentrating on and just skated "normally". Which may have been the intention. Plus some drills, in which learn that I can't steer. Well, this is not really news, but it's disappointing to learn that it's so unusual: everyone else in the group (some on much longer frames than me) can.

The video review itself happened in the evening. Seems that Sebby has two commandments: (1) thou shalt set down underneath the body; (2) thou shalt be on only one skate at a time. Apparently I'm still skating with both feet on the ground. My setdown, though, he says, is good - which I guess means that I've adapted to my experiments in tabbing.

Usually when I get videoed I spend ages replaying the footage in single-step, but this one I've only seen once. Should have it on a dvd sooner or later, I expect, then I can go through it looking for a new LSST forum avatar.