Adult Figure Skating

November 1, 2009

I don't know why it happened just today, but I have realized that I've been neglecting this web site for a long time.  There is a reason.

Last March I suffered a non-skating-related fall and wrenched my knee.  It took until the end of July before it was completely healed.

But then my back went out (oh the joys of being over 50!).

It had been threatening to do so for most of the last several years, becoming especially bad when, 2 years ago, I took a job that involves a lot of standing.  It has become such a problem that I'm pretty sure I can no longer skate at this time.  At least, I don't want to risk it.

I will be undergoing physical therapy starting this week.  If that helps, I'll be back.  If not...well, thanks to all who have followed this site.  I should know if I'll ever be better by January.  If not, the site will come down early in 2010.

Skating has been an adventure for me and I really hate the idea of giving it up.  But sometimes...well, you know the saying, "to everything there is a season."  And anyway, at this point no one's actually said I can't skate.

Thanks again.

Most of the text on this site is devoted to the unique folks who have decided, way past their supposed "best used by" date, that they would like to become figure skaters.  All of this site is devoted both to these precious few, and also to the many who have already started the journey.  Welcome aboard, newbies -- and to all the current adult skaters tuning in, thanks for dropping by!  I hope you enjoy this site.

If you have special Adult or Master skating announcements, please submit them to the site owner at deathdropdame@yahoo.com.  Thanks.

Special Announcement from the site owner: there have been many rules changes in Adult/Master skating recently.  I will soon be busy updating this site to reflect those changes.  I'll also be skating again starting in June (2009), as my knee injury is nearly healed now.  Please check back with this site soon for updates!

--szarembski2006

Here are some subjects addressed by this site.  Click on the subject you are interested in and you will be taken to the page it appears on.  Note that you will have to look at the entire page (that is, scroll down) to find the subject you are interested in, as you will not be taken to the exact paragraph where it is addressed:

Adult Figure Skating Levels (USFSA)
Blade Sharpening
Careers in Skating
Clothing for Skating
Coach
Competition
Dealing with Child Skaters
Double Runners
Etiquette
Health Issues
Ice Skating Institute
Kids (skating alongside)
Off-Ice Training
Professional Figure Skating (current state of)
Protective Gear (and also here)
Skate Canada
Skating Blades
Skating Boots
Skating Class
Skating Terms
Socks
Testing (Ice Skating Institute)
Testing (USFSA)
Why Figure Skating Moved Indoors
Why is Figure Skating Not on TV Much Anymore

I was born in Chicago a long, long time ago.

Around the same time, a now Formerly Very Famous Skater was born in the same area.  We were in the same school district (but not the same school) with about 9,000 other kids, and never met.  And our skating experiences were not parallel.

Where my contemporary's skating existence was filled with rules, mine had no rules except for the ones governing when hockey could be played -- and those were ignored.  I finally quit skating around 1969 after narrowly missing getting a concussion when a hockey puck flew about a half inch from my ear, and the hockey player who miss-hit it proceeded to scream at me for not being careful.  This was, mind you, during a no-hockey hour.  To this day I retain an abhorrence of hockey and most of its players.

Prior to that, I had been on the ice every winter since I could walk.  At first I skated on double runners (click on the term for more info) clamped to my snow boots, and later in figure skates bought from Sears -- the kind with the white faux-fur collar around the top, and pale-blue felt “insulation” with little white snowflakes printed on it inside (click here to get an idea of what they were like, minus the faux fur and the felt).  The boots were soft, the picks were tiny, the blades were bolted on and we never sharpened them (outdoor ice didn't seem to require sharp blades for some reason).  I still have my mother's pair of Sears skates and will never part with them.

My own skates are long gone, but I remember that they were always big enough so I could wear at least 2 pairs of socks underneath, and were always too cold, anyway.  My coach was my mom, who had been a promising athlete when young, but had been pushed toward speed skating by her older brothers when secretly she wanted to be a figure skater.  She denies it to this day, but I know her well enough to know the truth.

So I learned a few little tricks, such as a spiral and simple jumps and spins (and of course, forward crossovers).  It was all fun; in my world there was no USFSA, no ISI, no ISU, no testing, no competitions, no aging-out.  Around age 11 I had the near-miss with the hockey puck (to say nothing of the hockey puck that hit the hockey puck), and walked away "forever."  The hockey players had been becoming increasingly aggressive on the outdoor rinks in the late 1960’s, most of the figure skaters had escaped to the brand-new indoor ice rink in town (Iceland), which I couldn’t afford, my friends thought skating was stupid, and so it just wasn’t fun anymore.  Or so I thought.

Sometime in the late 1990’s, something happened; I don’t remember what.  I had always watched figure skating on television, even during the long years I was away from skating myself.  Perhaps it was something I saw on television that got me going. (It definitely wasn’t Tonya-vs.-Nancy’s knee, if anyone’s thinking that.  That was way before I came back to the ice, and far from sparking my interest, that whole weird affair just made me cringe.)

Anyway, around 1998 or ’99, I found myself in a public skate stumbling around in an awful pair of rentals, on indoor ice for the first time in my life.  This was at the same Iceland that had for so long seemed too forbidding to enter.  About 10 feet from the rink door, I fell and wrenched my knee.  I wouldn’t be on the ice again for nearly a year, when I worked up the nerve to sign up for an adult class.

I showed up for the first class as a bundle of nerves, and again wearing rentals.  The teacher was a forbidding Russian who didn’t see the point of adults skating, and hated anything that looked like a beginner.  As an adult beginner, I practically had an engraved invitation to quit the class. But somehow, I stayed with it.

The teacher would not believe that I had ever skated before.  I was that bad.  Forget muscle memory; I didn’t even have enough of that to claim a memory lapse.  I have some athletic gifts, I now realize, but back then I didn’t know it.  I was tangled mass of jitters for my first year on the ice.  But somehow, the worse things got, the more I wanted to skate.

It was during this period that I first found out that adult skaters were starting to be taken seriously by the established skating world.  It’s amazing to me now how much has changed in just the few years I’ve been skating.  At the very least, the help at the rink’s front desk no longer automatically assume that an adult is there to pay the ice fee for a child.  Figure skating now offers worthy goals for adults, and I started wanting the goodies for myself.  I think this is why I stuck with it.  So what if I’ll never be that one-in-a-million little girl who makes it to the Olympics, when I can possibly be a middle-aged adult who
can do an axel?

I’ve still got a long way to go before I get where I’m going.  But I’ve met a lot of nice people along the way, people with the same passion, who don’t think I’m nuts for wanting to throw away time and money on something that is never going to make me a living.

This site is for those people as well as the adult beginner skaters I cherish.

The best e-mail list for competitive adult skaters:

http://ca.groups.yahoo.com/group/compadultsk8s/

The worldwide resource for figure skating online:

http://www.goldenskate.com/  

THE adult figure skater's journal:

http://www.skatejournal.com/index.html