All Ice, All Weekend (but no Figure Skating)

I’ve always enjoyed writing, but for the last couple of years, I’ve gotten out of practice.  That’s had all kinds of ramifications, from failure to keep up with blogging to remarkably sluggish turnout of academic papers.  One of the culprits might be my current love of figure skating, because I tend to do that four to five mornings a week, which makes me extremely happy, but as a morning person, this used to be the most productive time of day for me work-wise.  In an effort to become more flexible (I used to not even be able to touch my toes), I’ve also started do a lot more yoga, also in the morning.  What to do?  I came up with an idea, and we’ll see if it works.  I’m using the season of Lent as a way of re-establishing my writing habit.  Since I don’t want to lose my yoga practice, my Lenten resolution is two-fold: every day for the forty days of Lent, I need to do at least 30 minutes of yoga and fifteen minutes of writing.  I did make a special contingency that if I HAVE to miss a day of either or both, I have to “make it up” the next day.  So far, I’ve already had to make up one writing day, but it still definitely is getting me in the mode of thinking each day about writing, and how to fit it in my day.  And so today’s goal was to get back in the swing of blogging, and here I am, typing away.

The next post after this one will be looking at what I’ve done figure skating-wise, since the New Year  began, but for today’s post I thought it would be fun to record the ice events of the weekend which, for a change, had nothing to do with figure skating.  On Saturday, I participated in SMC’s annual women’s only ice climbing day, and Sunday I finally checked off a long-running bucket list goal of participating in the town of North Hero’s Great Ice weekend with the event I’d always wanted to do — skating from the shore across the frozen ice of Lake Champlain to Knight Island.

My friend Paul likes to tell his first year students “Don’t Anticipate, Participate.”  I should have taken his advice this weekend, rather than pre-loading both events with expectations.  I had walked into the women’s ice trip with some trepidation: my friend and fellow student instructor Sophie, who was scheduled to be one of the leaders of the trip had to back out with a broken wrist, and friend and colleague Rai didn’t make it to the sign in on time and had to back out.  Three senior students and friends I had lobbied hard to sign up were going, and I wasn’t feeling particularly competent about the whole thing.  As it turned out, it was a phenomenal day.  The weather was great, the participants — Summer, Victoria and Tova, together with their roommate Roxy and fellow senior Amelia, had such great energy the whole day was a blast.  Best of all, lead instructor Andrea and student instructors Lindsey and Becca were outstanding.

What a great instructor team looks like: Lindsey, Becca and Lead Instructor Andrea

With their support, I climbed the hardest (as in most vertical route) I’ve ever done, and climbed a simpler one with just one ice axe to have the opportunity to work on footing.

Starting at the bottom of the most vertical climb I've ever done.

Andrea caught this shot of a much more tired version of me almost at the top.

Buoyed by my unexpectedly shiny, happy climbing day, I sauntered into Great Ice waaay on the overconfident side.  After all, I skate many more days than I don’t; what could possibly go wrong?  Michelle was as eager to put on some Nordic skates and tackle the rough ice as I was, and Jon was ready to give the recreation pair of regular skates he’d bought last year a go.  But getting on the ice at the shore, it was hard not to notice that, not only was the ice really rough, it had at least a half inch of snow on it all the way across the lake. Jon was the first to decide that skates were not going to work and switched to microspikes over his shoes.  Five minutes in, Michelle followed suit.  Undaunted I was convinced that through sheer force of will I would get the hang of the Nordic skates and stop nearly falling over the toes every time the front of the blade would hit a particularly big bump.  After I got home I looked it up and discovered the crossing was two miles long; it definitely felt like more as I reaped the karmic reward for every time in the last year I glared at a kid on a milk  crate at the rink for nearly running into me. Today, I was that kid again, slowly creeping along on my  Nordic skates while Jon and Michelle tactfully slowed their march to the Island lest I take a nosedive and need them to backtrack and save me.

A victory moment on finally reaching the shore of Knight Island.

With my patient and wiser fellow trekkers, Jon and Michelle before we began the trek back.

When we reached the island I declared victory, drank my hot chocolate that was there to reward all those who made the trek, and having learned my lesson, donned my microspikes for the much-quicker shoreline march.

Although the weekend’s ice activities were different than those I usually blog about, the lessons were painfully familiar: better to put more energy into action and less into expectations (good or bad); good teachers can make or break and experience; and everything is more memorable when you do it with great people.