Candice: It's Not Me, It's You

Let me just start this entry by saying, "OH MY GOD I THOUGHT I WAS BROKEN, DOOMED NEVER TO COMPLETE A SPIN BEYOND THREE CRAPPY REVOLUTIONS. WHY MEEEEEEE?"

Phew. That felt good. You might have noticed that after my one enthusiastic post about spinning I sort of never mentioned it again. And the reason is I spent a year being awful at it. A year! I didn't admit it to very many people but it was frustrating me to the point that I sort of felt like a fool. I mean, it's not like I was upset I had not mastered a spin combo. I was upset that I could not actually spin. A few months, sure, a year, though? I mean, was I really expected to spend two years mastering the most basic of spins.

Now, you're probably wondering why my coaches didn't help me. I'm not 100% sure, but spins must be some sort of red-headed stepchild to most coaches, because for the longest time every coach, everyone of them, would generally be like, "Oh, yeah, spins" in the last five minutes of class. Meaning the I got about one minute of instruction with such gems as "Yeah, that's not too bad."

Perhaps the problem was practice. I despised being bad at them. I hated trying again and again for something that was slow and unstable and nothing like the spins that make me so happy to watch. But then I had to remind myself that it's been a year and even a year of so-so practice should yield some sort of result.

The problem, it turns out, was just that no one seemed to believe I really wanted to get better at them. Our new coach has a lot of experience with adult skaters and when I said I wanted to learn how to improve my spins, he basically improved them in two ten minute lessons.

First, he showed me how to enter a spin moving. Then, he told me to bend my stupid knees. Why those two things never occurred to a coach before, I have no idea. But those two tidbits of advice were all I need to go from HORRIBLE WOBBLY SPIN THAT LOOKS SUPER LAME to "holy shit that was actually... centered." Leading me to feel two wildly disparate emotions the first being, "Yay!" the second being, "Wtf?"

I don't know why in a year no one thought to tell me to hold my body a different way. Did they think I'd just figure that one out on my own? Did they think I got a kick out of being bad at spins? Did they think I didn't actually want to know? I guess it doesn't really matter. The point is that I'm done with lessons. Once this next round is over I'll be getting a coach for private lessons, monetary investment be damned, because I'm not spending another year waiting for someone to point out that my arm is in the wrong place.