Lessons I learned the hard way, cont’d
New skates should be sharpened before being used.
I decided to take my new blades to a public skate at Kingsgate Ice Arena out in Kirkland yesterday afternoon, and figured I’d get there a half hour early so I could get my skates sharpened beforehand. As luck would have it, the arena shop was closed until a half hour before the session ended. The rental office didn’t have hockey skates in my size, so I figured I’d skate around until the shop opened up.
That was probably a bad idea. As much as I enjoy the challenge of attempting to skate on blades that probably couldn’t slice open a block of tofu, it’s a lot more fun when they’re sharp. As it was, I had a very dull inside edge, and—outside edge? What’s an outside edge?
It could have been a lot worse—surprisingly, I managed not to fall once despite having the traction of your average Seattle driver in a snowstorm—but I have to say, skating with a dull edge is a bit like an engine problem limiting a Ferrari to 30kph. Quite frankly, it makes one look like a beginner. I think there were five-year-olds skating circles around me.
It is interesting, though, the range of people that show up to a public skate on a Sunday. Half of the demographic consists of kids up to ten. Parents, or at least, the ones not watching from the stands, fill up most of the other half. Several teenage girls (or, in figure skating parlance, “ladies”—by the way, have you ever noticed that the most talented skaters at any public skate are almost invariably female?) skated circles around, well, just about everyone.
The strangest thing I find about figure skating is that I have any affinity to it at all. Not enough of an affinity to watch any events religiously, mind you, and it’s not nostalgia either; figure skating wasn’t something I was ever involved in as a child. No, it’s interesting because figure skating happens to be the closest thing sports has resembling performance art.
You pour in years of practice for a single performance that will define how talented you are, to the exclusion of all other indicators. So does everybody else. At each tier of competition, one advances to the next level; a hundred more see their dreams end.
And if, by some combination of talent and luck, you reach the ranks of the truly elite, you enter an international-level competition circuit featuring judges rumoured either to be incompetent or corrupt (though, in the case of figure skating, this has improved to some degree in the last decade or so). You also discover that even if you’re a one in a million talent, basic arithmetic dictates that there are 1300 people in China just like you.
Hell, musicians even have their own version of the “kiss and cry”: it’s called backstage.
I do wonder what was on the mind of one of those girls at the rink yesterday as she practiced the layback spin for what must have been the two thousandth time. Not to be pretentious, but I get the impression I might know a little something about how it feels.