The months passed, and now I was not only turning from forwards to backwards with confidence and much better success rate, but I was doing crossovers going forwards. Turning from backwards to forwards was still a problem though but like everything else I learned, I knew how to sort it out. It would just take 4 or 5 hours of repetition. One hour each session, doing it over and over again. I still believe that you can learn most things without an instructor – you just need to try it enough times and eventually your body will adjust what it is doing to enable you to do it without stumbling and falling over as much. It’s never a case of not falling anymore – but those times get pretty few & far between.

Learning the backwards to forwards transition also taught me something about the learning process – something that I still refer back to it in my mind and it spurs me on when my practice today feels like banging my head against a brick wall. It taught me about one of the oddities of the learning curve. You can practice something again and again and get nowhere – no improvement at all. You may even get seemingly worse – but your body is learning. It may take a few sessions before the rewards are reaped, but they will come. Every single time you try something improves the eventual windfall when you start improving, or the ‘click’ as it all works for the first time.

My ‘warm up’ (the first thing I do) still tends to be the hardest trick I’m working on – it’s usually the best I’ll do it all day, and it feels great to see what goodies I saved up when practicing the last time.

Time flew, and occasionally I would have my mind blown by yet another skater that would leave me awestruck with their ability. ‘How can they possibly do that?’ I would ask myself. If I could do that thing they just did with their feet, I would be truly happy and content. I’d have arrived. The occasion I’m thinking of right now was a guy that stepped onto the ice just ten minutes before the end of the near-empty lunchtime session. He was masterful. He skated twice around the rink and then did a figure of 8 at one end. Loads of them – probably ten or so, and it wasn’t just your regular skating. As he curved around, he would switch seamlessly from forwards to backwards or vice versa, and do forwards & backwards crossovers with more confidence and power than I’d ever seen. It was like magic – so beautiful. I figured he must be the best skater I’d ever come across.

That experience drove me on for many months. Everything I did was with the express intention of bringing me closer to the freedom he must have felt as he had skated that day.

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