What I Can Do, What I Can't, and When My Gut Gets in the Way

I've been figure skating for about three years now. When I say I "figure skate," most people tend to ask, "So, can you do a triple axel?" It's usually stems less from sarcasm than from a genuine inability to think of a single other figure skating element.

But the fact is that I can do very little. Here's what I'm pretty confident with:

• Forward stroking
• Backward stroking
• Forward crossovers
• Backward crossovers
• Swizzles, forward and back
• Slalom, forward and back; with one foot on a good-balance day
• Bunny hop
• T-stop
• Snowplow stop
• Hockey stop
• Two-foot spin, verrrry slowly
• Inside and outside forward 3-turns
• Inside and outside Mohawks

So, really, not very much. I'm struggling now to learn:

• One-foot spin
• One- and two-foot spin from back crossovers
• Half-flip jump
• Waltz jump

My waltz jump is coming along nicely, though my transitions between crossovers to the jump are rough at best. Usually when I practice there's at least one 10-year-old practicing soaring waltz jumps a few feet away from me. I hope I'm imagining the looks of superiority I suspect they shoot my way. My half flip is laughable, largely because instead of launching off my toepick, I tend to sort of pivot on it, meaning I never entirely leave the ice. Gotta work on that one.

And I'm simply too fat to perform:

• Shoot the duck, when you skate low to the ice, with one leg stuck out in front of you. My body's too heavy to balance on one skate while remaining upright. This means I will have to lose significant amounts of weight to ever perform a sit spin. But good news, I'm years away from being able to do a sit spin anyway!
• Lunge. My butt gets in the way. I sort of did it a few times, but then I hurt my knee and am now lunge-shy. It's like when I was a kid and just becoming fat, and I became too scared to do a back handspring.

It took me an ungodly long time to do a Mohawk; trusting my feet, and accepting that I might fall, were challenging. I know that you must fall to become any good on the ice, but oh, it hurts. That much body weight smacking against the unyielding ice leaves me blue and swollen and cranky. The associated adrenaline rush typically knocks my proverbial breath away, and I have to leave the ice. I typically then sit on the bench, gathering myself. Each fall is somewhat devestating. Maybe I just need to start falling on purpose so I can overcome the fear and the pain more easily. Surely there's a cliche in that sentence somewhere.