I discovered a section of the Valley Ice Center's website dedicated to adult skating sessions. I had a feeling that these would be like skating at the rink at school, except with older adults instead of college students and maybe a couple faculty. And to my utter non-surprise, I turned out right. Same open ice because there aren't that many people, no huge amounts of kids that a regular public session would have, it's on the big and clean ice, and it's at a reasonable time at noon instead of the 9:30am public session on the curling ice which just kills all motivation to skate. However, unlike at school, I wasn't fearing for my life because none of the figure skaters were skating backwards with their legs up in the air and blades sticking out.
So I went to the adult skating session on Friday afternoon. Despite it being pricier than a regular public session, I definitely think it was worth the extra money to get much more open ice on the regular rink instead of the curling rink. I came away from the rink with a much more intense workout under my belt than I normally get when I go to the morning public session on the curling rink. So I think this is definitely money well spent.
I started with sprints. While I don't think my hockey lessons are quite at the level I want to be skill-wise, I definitely think I get winded way too easily. So after I did some crossovers and went around the ice for a couple minutes, I got on the goal line and went blue line and back, red line and back, other blue line and back, other goal line and back. After a minute rest, I got back on the line and went half rink and back, whole rink and back. Heart rate up, I thought about going whole rink one more time before doing more skill drills, but I figured I would have plenty of time to do more conditioning later on. My only skill criticism is that as I got fatigued, my confidence in stopping at high speed dropped exponentially, so that when I went the whole rink and back on the second set, I was stuttering on my stops. Fatigue definitely factored in, but I really need to get over my fear of falling on the ice without equipment on.
I wanted to focus on back skating, especially back crossovers, because I definitely feel that my back skating of late has fallen off a cliff, especially after a little scrimmage game at sticktime on Monday where I wasn't at all smooth trying to keep guys in front of me while I played back. But before I got into the teeth of my workout, I wanted to do some detail work on tight turns. I'm convinced that I won't get my tight turns right until I get another pair of skates because the off-fit of my left boot gets really distracting and even disconcerting performing certain skills at high speeds. But I did try to do some tight turns at medium speed before picking up the pace, and I feel much better after doing that bit of detail work because I developed the habit of moving with my hips and legs and not leading with my head and shoulders. My turns are still wider than I would like them to be, but at least I'm not throwing my body into them and instead am letting my shoulders lead me into them. (Also: watch Pavel Datsyuk own at tight turns.)
For the remaining 60 minutes or so on the ice, I spent at least 50 of them on back skating work. At a certain point, everything became a blur both because of my overall focus on my workout and because of my legs crying out from fatigue from the nonstop movement, so I truthfully don't know where to begin.
The two big things were back crossovers and back quick starts. I stayed in one end of the rink, using the faceoff circles as a guide and trying to do back crossovers at medium speed while staying along the circle. The first sign I was having trouble with this exercise was that I could not maintain my pacing for my exercise. Although I would try to work up to full speed, I kept trying to maintain half speed so that I could hyper-focus on my movement during the skill, but the choppy motion of moving one leg over the other meant that I was picking up more speed than I wanted to and that I couldn't really do much detail work. I eventually got the motion figured out, on both sides, so while I was still having some speed control issues, I felt like I was getting more fluid in my motion, though I was still stronger crossing left over right than right over left. Part of the issue that I'm figuring out now involves my not being incredibly stable skating backwards on one foot. This instability leads to me putting my crossover foot back down sooner than I want to if I want to go at less than full speed.
Oy, back quick starts. I'm not terribly good with them if my left foot is in front, but I'm comfortable doing it from that side. Conversely, I'm not too comfortable with them if my right foot is in front, but when I can execute it, I do it much better on that side.
I have plenty of problems with form. I'm getting better at the initial dig into the ice, but when my left foot is doing the initial dig, I have a tendency to go more sideways than straight back. On both sides, I'm definitely not keeping my head up or my body aligned so that I can see what's in front of me since the point of this exercise is to get me used to skating back quickly while still being able to see the ice and follow where the play is going as everybody moves into my defensive zone. When I lead with my left foot, I end up looking at my skates too much, not so much to the point where my entire upper body is leaning down or hunched over, but my head is definitely down and looking at the toes of my skates as I execute the drill. When I lead with my right foot, my entire body, not just from the waist down, is perpendicular to where I should be looking or where I should be skating backwards. I'm not entirely sure there's something I can do about this problem aside from recognizing it and trying to keep my head up.
I'm the most comfortable I've ever been just back skating in general, but my back crossovers and back quick starts definitely need a lot more work. I don't know if I've actually managed to get my backwards skating speed to be as fast as my forward skating, but I'm definitely at the fastest I've ever been while skating backwards. I don't know when the next time I'll go to a dedicated skating session will be, but I'll see if I can't start working to incorporate some skating drills into my sticktime practices.
I'll definitely need to do something about my skates in the future. I've talked before about how my skates are very likely half a size too big for me to fully utilize their potential, but I've also noticed in recent weeks that my left skate isn't oriented the same way as my right skate. I don't know if this is the product of stopping too much leading with my left foot (since I'm most comfortable stopping left foot first) or if it came to me this way when I bought it and didn't notice it until now, but my left runner and holder look and feel like they're pointed slightly to the right of center underneath my toe. It would certainly explain why I don't seem to have any ability to use my outside edge on my left skate, especially on crossovers (either direction), but I've managed to not be a total train wreck on skates with them so far. I definitely want to correct the sizing issue at some point when I have enough funds, but I'll probably also want to pay attention to the holder and runner too. I know Easton's recent Mako skate intentionally has an asymmetric design for better turns, but I'm not so convinced my Bauer Vapor X3.0's were supposed to be created the same way. Maybe they were and I just wasn't paying attention or a good enough skater yet to know the difference, but it's definitely something new to keep my eye on the next time I buy a pair of skates.
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