I skipped a couple skating sessions again and haven't been running either. I've been a bit of a soggy blob, in other words, not good for the week before Thanksgiving.
I also stayed up Sunday night and read all night, which may have something to do with my willingness to be idle. Good reading. Love reading. Adore reading. This leads to exhausted Pointy. Yeah. Now. Onto skating. Like I said, this is the week of Thanksgiving and the schools had a half day today, which means everybody and their little sister has congregated on the public ice skating session which is normally all but deserted. Okay, fair enough. Lots of little kids having races, skating backwards, and generally making it hard to get up any steam without fear of crashing into someone. Admittedly, most of these kids are pretty good at getting out of the way, if they have the skill to get up any speed. On the other hand, they also like to crash. Enough said.
Despite this, I was able to do a lot of my regular workout. Backwards crossovers, Backwards and forwards three-turns merging into twizzles. Some spin practice. I felt like I was actually getting a lot better at the spin, not as good as I'd like but I'm getting some revolutions and speed. The three-turns are getting more second nature and I can do more turns on the twizzles which chain them together. In both cases, I think it's better balance and control that's making the difference.
I also started to try another kind of turn called a bracket turn. It's like a three-turn but instead of the outline you make with your skate being shaped like a three, it's bracket shaped. It requires changing the direction of curvature (clockwise or counterclockwise) right before changing from backwards to forwards skating, (and then reversing curvature again) so it's a little more complicated. Plus I haven't tried it before. So I got a bruise on my elbow, and marginal success, but again. It's just one of those things I'm going to have to practice.
