And, they include spirals. (The older I get, the harder a spiral becomes. Can kill my lower back, causing sciatica nerve pain and absolutely no skating when that flares up.) I really hope the "adult section" thinks hard about spirals at the bronze, adult level. They are asking for two lengths of the ice, on edges. That's alot of repeated leg lifting.
Believe it or not, the silver spiral pattern used to be the one from pre-pre (straight line spirals). There also used to be a stupidly difficult (for the level) 3 turn pattern on pre-bronze that is now gone since they moved the pre-pre spirals to pre-bronze and put the prelim spirals on silver. It was that dumb 3 turn pattern that kept me from testing pre-bronze for like 2 years, then they went and changed it right about when I was finally ready to test it. I run through that 3 turn pattern every once in a while, and I still find it
very difficult for a supposedly low level pattern, and I've passed my silver moves.
The funny thing is, each time they make significant changes, they swear they won't make any more - but then more seem to keep coming. It's frustrating since it can often take us adults more than a few months to get a test level ready to put in front of the judges - the changes to the silver test back in 2011 meant that I didn't test my silver moves until 2013, because it took me that long to get the strength and endurance to actually skate that pattern strong enough to put it in front of the judges. Now when I look back that seems like an exceptionally long time to have worked on it, compared to the amount of work required to maintain it (I run through the whole pattern on average once a session, as part of my "warm up"), but it's the reality of skating as an adult - we just don't have the bodies that the little kids do, and I'm not even "that" old yet.
I tried to skate through the changes to the power circles on gold yesterday - YIKES. Granted I've been working on Gold for a year now, so I'm quite comfortable with the moves as they were, but I can see that it's going to take a significant amount of practice time to get as comfortable with the new patterns, and it may be a while before they are as strong as the old ones - and I wasn't planning on trying to find a test session this summer or enough ice time to practice for a test this summer, I had already talked to my coach about waiting until fall, so the changes sort of suck for me. There may still be a chance I can test them again before the changes go into effect, but I'm not sure I'd opt to try if I could.