*Sometimes, all you need is a kick up the backside*

I do sometimes wonder how my coach seems to know me so well - my style of learning, anyway. Maybe I just got really lucky when choosing a coach and accidentally picked the one with the perfect teaching methods for me, or maybe all good coaches pick up on things that tell them how best to work with a skater, I'm not sure. I'll come back to this in a moment....

I had my wrist surgery on Monday, an arthroscopy under general anaesthetic, and was out of hospital later the same day (after about four hours of puking my guts up thanks to my awful reaction to the anaesthetic, despite them pumping me full of anti-sickness medication...booooooo).

I'm all bandaged up and very sore, but survived, so that's gotta be a positive. I'm the world's worst doomsayer sometimes and was fairly convinced I would die in the operating theatre, haha! I have a nasty habit of imagining the worst
that can happen, and given that I knew I reacted badly to anaesthetic before, I wasn't convinced it was going to go well. I do make myself laugh.

So the idea was to look inside the wrist joint and see if they could find out what was stopping it moving properly (I got back virtually no supination (twist) after I broke it in October, and nine months on the specialist was saying the type of injury I had should never have affected the supination in the first place and couldn't understand it). Unfortunately, they've discovered the cause of the problem is scar tissue, which is something they can't fix. It seems the main broken bone (I broke two) must have gone into the joint, causing more damage than they thought it had.

The good news is it may improve over time if the scar tissue starts to break down, and now that we know that's what it is, a physio can work on helping it to do that. I just feel better knowing what it is, to be honest, because now I'm not afraid of it. There was always the uncertainty over what was wrong with it, and the thought that if something was out of place inside, for example, I might just wreck it completely if I fell on it or knocked it wrong.

Now that's out of the way I can crack on - no pun intended - with my skating and try to forget it ever happened.

Unfortunately, when I got back on the ice for the first time after my op (two days later), I was pretty useless. I skated forward, did a few forward and backward crossovers and that was about all I dared do. But I thought, you know, it's day one and you're in pain, give it time. The second time, the next day, I was worse than useless. Cue stress. I was still in a lot of pain (still am, to be fair) but could barely even bring myself to attempt forward crossovers, something I've been able to do for, oooh, a year maybe.

Thankfully, I'd already texted Coach A by then to say I would have my lesson on Friday and felt too bad quitting on him at the last minute, so went ahead anyway. I told him he'd have to be gentle with me, and he said ok, but to be honest, his face said no. :-)

And lucky for me, he was true to form, and wasn't at all gentle. We did ALL the scary things. Backward crossrolls, wrong-foot spirals (including on an outside edge), twizzles (ok, I actually don't find twizzles scary, but still), continuous three turns, barrel rolls, a scary crossover exercise he has me do that terrifies me, and spins from crossover entry....And you know - this is what I was getting at at the beginning of this post - it WORKED. I'd never refuse to do something Coach A asked me to do, so I just did it all. An lo, I'm still alive and in one piece.

This is why I think I have the perfect coach for me. He seems to know exactly what I'm capable of and will push me further than I think I can go; it's been like that since the beginning. I totally need that - high expectations that I automatically try to live up to because I can't bear the thought of letting him down. That's just me. I hate the idea that someone would invest so much time in me only for me to throw it back in their face by not giving it my all. And yes, I know I'm the one paying for the lessons, but that's even more reason to try my best in my book - what's the point of wasting money and time if you're not going to give it 100%?

I also love that he's great at coming up with exercises for me to do that seem to instantly help when I've been struggling with something. A couple of examples:

In my step sequence, I have a bit where I step into a right outside three from backwards. For ages, I kept coming to a standstill at that point, grinding up on my toe pick and stopping before trying to step to forward to do the turn. So I got an exercise to do where I would go down the rink doing three turns and crossovers - hard to describe - but the outcome was I stopped having so much of an issue with that within about a week.

Another example is the one-foot spin. I've been stuck in the same place with it for ages and suddenly last week I was "banned" from practising it any other way that with a three-turn to begin with, a lunge, change of direction, crossover, THEN into the spin. Again, difficult to describe, but you'll see me doing it (sort of) in one of the videos I'm going to link. Again, it suddenly improved overnight. Still needs a LOT of work, but it's definitely moved on.

Speaking of giving it 100% - a bunch of us who have Coach A started an off-ice class run by him a few weeks ago. He nearly killed us in week one, just to make a point of showing us all how unfit we are, I think! I'm really pleased it was started because I can feel the benefits it's having on my skating and general fitness already. I think it'll make a huge difference to on-ice jumps, practising them off-ice too. I've discovered I'm hopeless at them off-ice, so what chance do I have on-ice?? I'm determined to keep up the fitness regime now I've started it, I've even arranged to meet a friend for a pre-skate run this Monday. Must be mad :-)

I've had a friend video my skating a few times in the past couple of weeks. It's cringey as hell to watch them, but I think you learn a LOT from it so I intend to keep doing it. I can see first-hand all the things my coach tells me I need to be more aware of and it really makes it sink in - especially my issues with my arms! They don't behave themselves at all, the gangly little buggers. Looking back on old videos helps a lot too actually, because you can see the progression that you're normally completely blind to. Another friend posted a video on Facebook that she found of me practising drags about a year ago and even I could see the difference between then and now, even just in my speed over the ice, my general skating and confidence. Yes, I still have issues with confidence - but it hasn't half grown since then!

In the most recent videos I had someone do, I was practising my spin from crossover entry (with that funny little preamble beforehand too):

Compare it to when I was attempting to do a two-foot spin about 6 months ago:
Spin1

I also had her video my attempts at a teapot and spiral:

I'm quite pleased with the spiral - it's definitely higher now than it was 6 months ago. And if I keep putting the  hard work in, hopefully I'll be able to get it better still. Ouchies, here I come.