Just wondering.
On clear, soft ice I skate fairly well. I may not be super-elegant, but I look competent and I'm working on Moves up to Juvenile equivalent. I skate powerfully and fast.
But when ice conditions are less good I feel like a totally different person. Today I came back from a demoralising skate at another rink, with ice so hard and mashed up that I could barely hold an edge. I couldn't centre a spin, my posture was all over the place and I slipped on jumps. Yet other people there - even beginners - seemed to be coping better than me.
It makes sense that better ice = better skating but I feel like, at this stage, I should at least be able to MANAGE on bad ice, not have so huge a contrast.
Any thoughts...?
If you only skate on fast, pristine ice, you don't get as difficult a workout. Everything comes easier.
I started out skating on outdoor ice, which is hard and slow (not to mention FREEZING) so I had to work for every bit of speed. I have a lot of power as a result and that training lasted a long time.
Our crowd of adult skaters used to go to different rinks to skate and you learned which rink had hard ice, which one had slow ice and which was fast and great for spins. You had to adjust your skating techniques to make everything work under different conditions.
So, don't write off a rink with poor (for you) ice - think of it as a challenge. I used to coach with a guy from the Ukraine who said that we're really fortunate in the US to have such nice ice to skate on.
To answer you question: A LOT. A TON.
I blame the ice A LOT. It's ALWAYS the ice's fault. It's too hard, too soft, too brittle, too wet, someone put a big rut in it, there's a hole right where I wanted to do my loop... it goes on and on.
The problem is- when you compete or test, you don't know what kind of ice you are going to get. So even if it is the ice's fault, you have to learn to deal with it.
I spin best on beautiful clear ice- a rut can ruin a good spin, but perfer to jump on more messed up ice...I don't like to jump when skating fast, and you skate faster on good ice.
If the ice is very bad- I will not even try 8-step mohawk. That is my limit. My coach understands. He doesn't really want to take me to the hospital, and I'm so uncomfortable with the move, it isn't worth adding another bad element to the equation.
Quote from: Skittl1321 on December 08, 2011, 08:13:23 PM
To answer you question: A LOT. A TON.
I blame the ice A LOT. It's ALWAYS the ice's fault. It's too hard, too soft, too brittle, too wet, someone put a big rut in it, there's a hole right where I wanted to do my loop... it goes on and on.
The problem is- when you compete or test, you don't know what kind of ice you are going to get. So even if it is the ice's fault, you have to learn to deal with it.
I spin best on beautiful clear ice- a rut can ruin a good spin, but perfer to jump on more messed up ice...I don't like to jump when skating fast, and you skate faster on good ice.
My friend the Big Guy says it best, "The Ice Doesn't Care." A skater just has to learn to skate around it as a problem. I've seen ice so snowed up that I could barely move on it, but a more experienced skater just goes out and does expert graceful figures. It's a matter of technique.
The ice may not care, but the ice is just a jerk. It's still its fault!
I think a lot of it is psychological.
I try not to blame the ice. I always blame myself - I stayed up too late the night before and didn't get enough sleep, I wasn't trying hard enough, I wasn't focusing on engaging my muscles enough, and so on.
I don't blame the ice because I know that in summer, the ice will have an inch of water on the surface and that's a non-negotiable. As soon as the temperature outside creeps over 30 degrees, the water appears, and increases with the temperature outside. There's nothing I can do about that. What I CAN do something about is the way I skate and how hard I'm working.
The one time I DID blame the ice was when the Zamboni was doing something so weird...it was like skating on corrugated iron. Literally. To the point that everyone's skates were making audible knocking sounds just gliding! It was so bad that the coaches told the Nationals-level skaters not to pull out the big jumps (especially as the Senior girl was there - she took one heck of a fall trying to set up her triple sal, and after that no-one was keen anyway!) Everyone's spins were wobbly, and the session turned into one giant Moves session.
Quote from: AgnesNitt on December 08, 2011, 08:43:00 PMIt's a matter of technique.
I agree.. the only thing that truly bothers me is when the ice has an uneven cut (like when the zam blade is off or something, it leaves little 1/2"+ high "steps" everywhere the zam goes and it's really irritating to skate on) or there are condensation bumps (those can get pretty big) because they haven't resurfaced since the night before.. or the condensers are out and there are puddles or the ice is slushy all over (part frozen and part water and feels like skating on gravel). Anything else is really not that big of a deal.
I have simply caught a weird edge on pristine ice as many times or more as I've been caught in a rut and could clearly blame the rut.. so I really am at the point where I won't blame the ice, it's usually me. I've never been caught in a rut/hole/whatever landing a jump so that doesn't really scare me, and honestly if you have enough speed going into a jump, whatever you hit on the landing won't matter if the landing is strong.
All that said, I tend to skate on freshly resurfaced sessions with very few skaters (and all of us feel like it's crowded when there are 10 people on the ice) so it's what I am used to now, but I remember when I was learning to skate (mostly on publics) that clean ice really intimidated me a lot just because I wasn't used to it.. it seems scarier than it really was. I skate once (sometimes twice) a week on trashed public ice with the kids and the condition of the ice doesn't bother me as much as the number of skaters going in random directions with random skating abilities.
Quote from: Skittl1321 on December 08, 2011, 08:52:19 PM
The ice may not care, but the ice is just a jerk. It's still its fault!
Even expert skaters like good ice. And expert skaters hate bad ice.
Good ice: My dance coach and I got on freestyle one day, and he kept skating around making happy noises. It was really good ice. Second best I've ever skated on.
Bad Ice: The Oldest Practicing Skating Coach In The World (I think she's 80) was giving me a lesson and got so mad at the horrible ice, she stormed off the ice to give the zamboni driver a piece of her mind.
Quote from: sarahspins on December 08, 2011, 10:57:28 PM
I agree.. the only thing that truly bothers me is when the ice has an uneven cut (like when the zam blade is off or something, it leaves little 1/2"+ high "steps" everywhere the zam goes and it's really irritating to skate on) or there are condensation bumps (those can get pretty big) because they haven't resurfaced since the night before.. or the condensers are out and there are puddles or the ice is slushy all over (part frozen and part water and feels like skating on gravel). Anything else is really not that big of a deal.
The corrugated iron ice: we had that on one section of the rink once. I just refused to go there. I don't have the technique to deal with it.
Ice bumps: Didn't Jim Stanmore once post a picture in the old forum, of an ice bump next to his skate? The bump was higher than the boot sole. It was more of an ice mountain.
I personally like the ice when it has been skated on just a little as opposed to just freshly cut. It helps me judge the surface better and it feels more stable. Go figure...
When I first started skating I liked softer ice, now I feel better on harder. I keep my blades ROH at 1/2, so on softer ice they really dig in and slow me down. But ice can be too brittle sometimes and then I don't feel as secure with toe jumps.
I would like to blame the ice but we never seem to have optimal ice so I'm not sure how I would skate on it! When we have beautiful, clear ice, it's because there's going to be a big hockey thing so they drop the ice temp way down for "faster ice" which means it's harder for my sharpened-once-every-three-months skates to hold an edge after a jump. I do spin faster, though.
When we have crappy ice, it's so rutted that it's virtually impossible to spin without falling into a rut. Some of the zamboni operators don't know how to keep the ice from getting pitted or covered with pimples. Some of them don't get the water hot enough and it leaves zamboni tracks across the ice.
Maybe I will just blame my equipment...
I always blame the equipment.
It's always the ice's fault, or the equipment's fault. It has absolutely NOTHING to do with my crappy skating. ;)
:WS: Smooth ice is nice! :BS:
I've known skaters who practice at many rinks - smooth, rough, hard (cold) and soft ice - so they can compete anywhere. Yuk!
Dd doesn't blame the ice unless it's unsafe (the one where it was so thin sand was exposed) or if she is dripping wet and has to change gloves (and she has the rest of the session in soaking wet pants). She thinks the bumps from the drips are funny (but she knows where they are so it's not a surprise). She has to be flexible because there are 4 sheets of ice she skates on regularly and they all have their own quirks.
It's best off to be comfortable in all kinds of situations. One year for Adult Mids, the ice wasn't cut pretty much ALL day. The Champ Masters Jr/Sr Ladies event was skated on a mess. They didn't blame the ice, though...
I blame both myself and the ice for the day I broke my ankle.
The ice was very uneven (read: hilly) and I'm not sure that going over the edge of one of those hills during my spin isn't what set off the accident. I tried to pull back towards center to avoid falling, but my foot got stuck the other way. My fault? The ice's fault? Both, I guess.
Either way, I want to have learned from it so in the future I: don't skate on ice I don't think I can handle, know when to fall instead of doing more damage by "correcting" it. If I *ever* get back on the ice. Sigh.
Corrugated ice: they managed to do that once at the rink I learnt at as a teenager. As that rink was also partly in a tent, so the ice was usually covered in water in places due to the heat, that was not a pleasant session (and the fact that I still remember this many years later should tell you something about the ice conditions!).
I'm with whoever said they like the ice when it's been skated on a little bit, rather than being freshly resurfaced. I agree it somehow feels more secure once it's slightly roughed up, but not too much!
It's funny how you get used to the ice at your home rink though, and how other surfaces feel different in some indefinable way. That's when I start blaming the ice conditions - the ice doesn't feel right at the 'other' rink.
I've skated on a few rinks, but my first away from home competition the ice was really weird and I couldn't jump at all! Someone else had the same problem and was freaking out. Obviously people could jump, and all the kids from my rink (I didn't tell them I found it so weird, didn't wanna put them off) did just fine.
Quote from: karne on December 08, 2011, 09:53:09 PM
I think a lot of it is psychological.
I think this might be right. I also find that if I start off on OK ice which then becomes terrible, I can cope a lot better.
Quote from: sarahspins on December 08, 2011, 10:57:28 PM
I skate once (sometimes twice) a week on trashed public ice with the kids and the condition of the ice doesn't bother me as much as the number of skaters going in random directions with random skating abilities.
I have to skate mostly on publics these days (start work too early to make a freestyle). I was referring to publics (none of the rinks I skate at have restrictions on figure skating on publics - it's a "common sense" approach). At one of these rinks a busy public may not be resurfaced for over 5 hours. By the end it is a mess, and you still have to watch out for the random cross-cutting kids. It's a big test of patience!
Quote from: techskater on December 11, 2011, 07:48:11 PM
It's best off to be comfortable in all kinds of situations. One year for Adult Mids, the ice wasn't cut pretty much ALL day. The Champ Masters Jr/Sr Ladies event was skated on a mess. They didn't blame the ice, though...
They also have much better technique than I could ever hope to ;)
But seriously, no resurface??
Quote from: techskater on December 11, 2011, 07:48:11 PM
It's best off to be comfortable in all kinds of situations. One year for Adult Mids, the ice wasn't cut pretty much ALL day. The Champ Masters Jr/Sr Ladies event was skated on a mess. They didn't blame the ice, though...
Somehow I doubt that not a single competitor bemoaned that they didn't skate their best because the ice sucked.
Whenever ice is bad at adult nats, it is all over the boards (melting...brittle etc)
It clearly does make a difference, as evidenced by the fact that I finally landed some nice, solid axels this week when I skated on a rink with good ice! My usual rink has very hard, brittle, hilly ice, and not only does it make me feel like I can't get a secure edge for axel and double salchow takeoffs, but it also makes me feel exhausted by the end of my program. I need deeper knee bend and more pushing to skate on hard, hilly ice, so it's probably good that I'm used to that instead of being used to the good stuff.
Quote from: Skittl1321 on December 14, 2011, 04:27:58 PMSomehow I doubt that not a single competitor bemoaned that they didn't skate their best because the ice sucked.
:)
What a cool sentence! A great exercise for school kids.
Make them analyze and diagram the grammatical structure, and extract the semantics.
Ask them if it is a triple or or a quadruple negative.
BTW, no offense intended. I just had to stare at it a moment to understand. Maybe several moments.
I guess you believe that at least one competitor complained that ice conditions interfered with his or her performance.
I wonder if anyone reads skatingforums.com through a computer translation program. It would be fun to feed the sentence into a computer translation program. Then tell it to translate the result back into English.
:)
It's possible if you did diagram it out- the sentence is wrong. I'm not a grammar person...
I did type bemoan and think "I wonder if I need another word" but couldn't think of one.
Yes, I think the skaters complained. Maybe privately. But NO ONE likes bad ice, and I doubt they skated their best on it, and I'm sure they were annoyed about it.
For fun, I used google translate to put it into Spanish, then back into English.
QuoteSomehow I doubt that a competitor not only lamented that did not skate her best, because the ice cake.
Cake?
Christmas time! I blame the ice a lot for weak spins, not so much for anything else.
I love the translation!
I think Lance Armstrong said that it's the hills that separate the best bicyclists. Bad ice is like that. Since I don't compete, I only skate where and when ice is nice.
Quote from: Bunny Hop on December 12, 2011, 11:05:32 PM
It's funny how you get used to the ice at your home rink though, and how other surfaces feel different in some indefinable way. That's when I start blaming the ice conditions - the ice doesn't feel right at the 'other' rink.
I don't know about others but try my home rink on a different day or even later the same day and you get a different result. There seems to be variations within the days too like 'amazing Sunday ice' (my regular lesson day), normal Sunday ice, trashy Sunday ice and just downright scary ice.
We skate fresh after hockey practice so usually the zamboni does an imperfect job of fixing it up after them, we deal with - nice ice is a pleasant surprise, but scary ice is just awful. I skated a Sunday morning & afternoon the other week (lesson & a practice) - and it felt like the time they were melting the ice for putting down the new ice floor - you would swear you were going to cut through the ice and ruin your blades on the floor below, now sensibly I know its sand but I always have this weird fear that it is concrete below...
My spins travel because the ice is slanted.
I don't know what's going on at our rink, but I feel weird everytime I step on the ice. I finally figured out that it's off-level and the ice is higher than the door jamb at the entrance, but there's a steep slope down towards the wall on each side. To get on the ice, you have to skate uphill. Very strange.
I think the guy who usually does the behind-the-scenes maintenance (like cross-cutting and edging) isn't at the rink anymore, so I guess they're just making do with the zamboni operators but it's not really good ice. At least that's what I hope because a frost heave would be really bad...maybe they were just building it up for the holiday rush.
Have done both the post-hockey ice and the sloped ice.
At our previous rink there was a club session after ice hockey practice on a Sunday night. They did a resurface, but the ice was still always awesomely bad afterwards. And then there was the Saturday afternoon session once where the ice was so bad my coach actually told me to look down to make sure I didn't trip (as I always look down anyway, this wasn't a problem...).
One of the London rinks, which shall remain nameless, had an ice surface that sloped downwards away from the centre. Doing swing rolls was fun there - you had to push really hard towards the centre, and than careered out of control towards the barrier going the other way.
Quote from: Bunny Hop on December 16, 2011, 04:13:33 AM
One of the London rinks, which shall remain nameless, had an ice surface that sloped downwards away from the centre. Doing swing rolls was fun there - you had to push really hard towards the centre, and than careered out of control towards the barrier going the other way.
I did figures at that rink and it was quite amusing, you had to push off as normal and not freak as you picked up speed going towards the barrier and then just hope you hadn't slowed yourself too much as otherwise there wasn't enough to get back around to finish the 8!
Apparently they've fixed the subsidence there, so it's now all flat. Now where's the fun in that?!
Quote from: fsk8r on December 16, 2011, 09:01:55 AMApparently they've fixed the subsidence there, so it's now all flat. Now where's the fun in that?!
:D Aw - now what will people complain about?
The best kids at my rink complain if the ice is bad (or as one of them said after a bad skate at a competition "the ice was slippery!"). But they still go out and skate their best. I think total beginners probably don't really notice too much (i used to prefer messed up ice because newly resurfaced ice was too slippy though lol!) and high level skaters probably notice but can skate on anything, its those of us in the middle who really get thrown off our game by different ice.
Worst ice i ever had was just before my rink closed for its annual ice maintainence, the concrete was coming through and even my coach kept tripping in the bits where there just wasn't ice, only concrete!
Quote from: Skittl1321 on December 15, 2011, 10:31:42 AM
For fun, I used google translate to put it into Spanish, then back into English.
Signature? Sure why not.
Quote from: kck on December 17, 2011, 09:05:18 AM
Signature? Sure why not.
At your first competition, good or bad, I expect you to pronounce the ice cake
I'm considering visiting a rink over xmas where I plan to compete at Easter (it's closeish to where my mum lives), and I am so going to tell my coach "the ice was cake!"
My Dad once complained for me because our Aussie Skate group went right after the ice resurface. There was a huge chunk of ice sitting on the surface (like, a block), right where I came out of my last waltz 3 in my program. I was the only skater with that much ice coverage. Anyway, I looked at it in the warmup, and just decided not to think about it. When I came off after my program, Dad made jokes about me "sweeping the stage" (rallying parlance = first car on the road in a rally tends to be referred to as "sweeping the stage" because they tend to sweep the gravel off the racing line).
It wasn't until I watched the video of my program that I realised I came within 10cm of this block of ice, and actually sent it skidding away.
I found when I first got back into skating I would tend to blame the ice A LOT lol!! Now I try to take it "as is", well this is considering how bad it is:) I skate at a lot of different rinks, and each has different ice; one has amazingly soft ice, while another tends to be cut up because the freestyle sessions are unfortunately right after hockey. I guess I am fortunate to skate at rinks that seem to maintain their ice to a degree.
I hate it when 90% of the ice is okay, except for one patch near the resurfacer door where's it's all lizard skin. It's like the ice has a sneaky part just waiting to grab my toepick and pull me down.
Ice conditions do affect skating, but unless the conditions are abysmal (like after the second hour of a crowded public session and no one should have to skate on that crud), you should be able to skate on anything. But whether it's hard or soft or pliable or brittle should be something you can work with. You can't "blame" the ice, though.