Another Day, Another Owie.

Let's cut straight to the chase: I went down hard at the rink last night. My dancing partner is still "on retreat" so coach K. and I were working on pre-bronze Moves stuff.  My Waltz 8 is improving but my "swingy" CCW 3-turn still leaves a lot to be desired.  Towards the end of the lesson my coach, probably in a moment of desperation (do you ever cause moments of desperation for your coach?) introduced me to alternating 3-turns.  She told me to work on them, saying "These are part of a higher MIF level than what you're trying to do but if you can manage to master them you'll be able to hold the edge coming out of that messy 3-turn of yours." And as our time was up, she then skated off to coach her next student.

What are alternating 3-turns you might ask?  I'll do my best to describe them:  draw a line on a piece of paper.  On one side of the line draw a cursive number 3 keeping the beginning, the cusp and the exit tracing all on one side of the line.  That's your first 3-turn.  Upon coming to the line with the exit edge, step over the line with your free foot and carve the opposite 3-turn, again keeping everything on that side of the line.  Continue doing this alternating pattern until you run out of space.  Since a video clip is worth a thousand words I'll let "geowench" demonstrate.  Impatience alert: things don't get moving on this clip for the first 15 seconds or so.

I was sort of getting the hang of this and mentally patting myself on the shoulder when I screwed up big time.

It was not one of those falls where your life flashes before your eyes in slo-mo and you have time to think about rolling up into a ball and protecting yourself.  It was more like one minute I was skating, and then--I wasn't.

I went down like a ton of bricks, smack dab on the trochanter of my right hip. Thankfully I had on my d3o padded shorts, etc.  Still hurt.  Can't imagine taking that fall without the ballistic padding.  Of course everyone on the ice skated over to see if the old man had shattered like a tea cup on a concrete floor.  Staggering back to my haunches I thanked them for their concern and toughed it out to the end of the session (yeah, I'm one of those puritanical guys:  if I've paid for a 2 hour session, by damn I'm gonna skate every minute of it even if it kills me) and then went home to lick my wounds.  I had a glass of wine and an aspirin and went to directly to bed.  Every time I rolled in my sleep that damn hip woke me up.  This morning I'm not only painful but sleep deprived and thus even snarkier than usual.  Say a prayer for my co-workers and pass me the Ben-Gue.