Warning: If you google “push dissected,” you will see some pretty icky photographs.

Ugh. But at least it puts my skating push problems into perspective. This week Laurie helped me take apart my push from right to left (forwards and backwards, outer and inner). One of my basic problems is that I am not bending my right ankle enough to create that necessary deepening of the inside edge.

So here I sit, watching videos of hockey players and Kseniya and Oleg pressing their ankles into their circles, and wondering about the following:

(a) how I could go so long without recognizing this problem,
(b) how I developed this problem, and
(c) how I am going to fix this problem.

Here are some possible answers:

(a) Doh!

(b) Two possibilities injuries come to mind. The first is my hip misalignment, which readers of this blog hear waaayyy too much about. The second was an injury I had nearly two decades ago, which involved several phases. Phase one was when I slipped on our ice-encrusted front steps and badly bruised my tailbone and back. Phase two was when I decided after only a week that I needed to get back on the ice because I was supposed to be part of a group number for our holiday ice show. Phase three was when I subsequently fell at the rink and broke my right fibula and tore a lot of ligaments in my right ankle. The only lucky part of that was that I got my skate off right away, before the swelling started. Ugh.

Well, at least no surgery was involved. And I did get back on the ice six months or so later. But I’ve noticed quite a bit of scar tissue and less flexibility in my right ankle to this day.

(c) Okay, this part of the post is much more upbeat. Working on building my mobility and strength in my right ankle will, I hope, be a fairly straightforward process. Off ice, I’ve already been doing lots of different exercises for my left foot, so putting equal time on the right ankle and foot should be no big deal. And now that I’m aware of the issue, I’ve been focusing on really pressing that right ankle and defining a deeper right inner edge push while doing different moves: alternating chassés, swing rolls, three turn entries, mohawks, you name it.

I can really feel that I’ve been using the right ankle (and right upper thigh) in ways that I haven’t before. That is a nice way of saying that my muscles are sore.

Boy, even with my optimistic (c) this post feels like quite a downer, huh.

Okay, what I need to do is to end with a gorgeous piece of music that somebody really good ought to skate to: an arrangement of Astor Piazzolla’s “Oblivion” featuring a French cellist, Ophélie Gaillard. Enjoy!