Skating to Music

This is the first time I have ever skated to music outside of doing a club show. It feels really weird but I think I like it a lot. The first two competitions I did I was entered in the compulsory moves events which were one minute mini programs without music. So the North Shore Open will be my very first program competition. I think my music is close to being perfect. I’m lucky my husband is a sound guy. He showed me how to use some editing software and I happily spent hours playing my music over and over chopping it up into little bits and glueing it back together so that I had exactly one minute and forty seconds of music that didn’t sound like it had been hacked up. Drove my kid up a wall. :-) Nice roll reversal for a change! Hubby then helped me out and changed the loudness of the beginning so that it could be heard in the rink. It is a piano piece that starts out softly which gets totally lost over a rink PA. I still haven’t heard this latest cut and am hoping that it will be fine.

Coach and I put together the choreography for it the other week and I have been skating full run throughs for two weeks now and with the music three times now. I love skating to the music. I can feel it. The little guy in my head shuts up and listens to the piano notes instead of yelling at me. I dance to the music but with skates on instead of ballet shoes. It is a wonderful feeling, getting lost in the music and it somehow flowing through me so that I can express it as movement on the ice. It is nothing like skating practice and nothing like rehearsing without the music. I have few words that can describe it but I adore it. I can see how this can become addictive, as if I wasn’t already enamored with skating. I am curious what five more weeks of practice will do to the number. I am already skating it pretty well. My coach has no corrections for me when I finish. When I am dodging people I don’t always make it to the final spin though. Coach tells me that should come with practice so I am not worried about it. This just feels right. The music helps me skate better. I can perform to it rather than just skate. This is fun!