Gee, I was the only person on the ice today, until the last 30 minutes, when I was joined by two other well behaved skaters.
There were no rules, because there was no skate guard present but me, and I wasn't working. Not a problem!
Should I feel guilty?
I.E., the trick to getting nice sessions is what it has always been: If you work while other people play, you can play while other people work. Would that be possible for you? It solves all these problems.
I think this is the bottom line. I know at our rink, weekend and evening public sessions are a wash, complete chaos. My DH and I are retired and we come up with some creative ways to avoid the crowds, get the freshest ice etc.etc. but we are lucky that we have the freedom to do so and lucky that or rink has various options. We are not advanced enough to skate freestyle and I am not sure it would even be the best place for us if we were, it is mostly younger girls who are doing a lot of jumping and spinning and of course, very fast paced.
Our rink has an adult skate that is 90 minutes MWF midday (where basically any type of skating goes, jumping, spins, ice dancing, lessons) and a two hour public session before and after (if you pay for an adult session you can also skate the public session before our after). On public sessions you cannot really do jumps if it is crowded or camel spins, there is an area in the middle for other spins and stuff). During the summer we skated exclusively the adult sessions because our rink has kids skate camp and groups all summer on public. Total chaos.
The adult sessions can get crowded, but typically I am able to get stuff done because most people are considerate skaters. I noticed pretty frequently towards the end of this summer at the adult sessions, we would see, what I suspect are older teenagers who have figured out that they can use our ice for a nice long, cheap, freestyle session. It was extremely disruptive to the adult lessons that were going on to have them flying through the middle of the lesson doing double jumps. I noticed one girl was even dropped off and picked up every time by her mom! I think they need to raise the "adult" age to 25 or 30, it is currently 18. Nobody said anything to anybody about it, probably because they are not technically breaking the age rules, but they are breaking etiquette for sure.
By far, our best skates are on quiet, public ice, and we find that on certain days of the week, certain times of the year. We have gotten to where we check in each week and find out if there are any large groups scheduled and avoid those days or skate adult sessions instead. This morning was a perfect example of quiet public, we had two of our adult skater friends there, one was having a lesson. And there were three small family groups with children on buckets, they usually stay on one end of the rink but today it was so quiet they kind of went all over, but there was still plenty of room to practice most anything. The rink knows most of us and seem to know that we use good judgment, and are careful about skating backwards and trying elements. If the rink is empty or only one or two other experienced skaters are there, I will often skate clockwise, it is really the only chance I get to do so.
Occasionally if we get to a morning session and it is unusually crowded and it is not a day we can wait for the adult session, we will actually hop back on the highway and drive another 45 minutes to another rink west of us. It is fairly large and not usually too busy during the week. The ice quality is not quite as good as our regular rink but it is a fun change and I have gotten some great practice at that rink. We visit there probably once every couple of months. I think we are very lucky to have both our schedule and access to good rinks.