Finding Balance as a Skater
The joy of senior skating
A year and a half ago, I was broken. I had lost my best friend in a divorce I didn’t want; I was unemployed and alone. I was looking for something to hold on to, to bring me joy and hope.
I had skated in my youth. My father was enamored with Peggy Fleming, Dorothy Hamill, and Dick Button. Maybe he didn’t want a child who was a world-class skater; I think he tried to instill his fascination with movement and his love of skating. He pushed six of us (myself, my three sisters, and two brothers) into figure skating lessons.
With me anyway, it didn’t take. I found skating lessons to be too rigorous and too demanding. Discipline was not my strong suit.
I am stubborn to the point of being impossible. My mother found me exasperating. One night, my mother told me to eat my peas or sit there. I was sent to bed at 10 p.m., the uneaten peas on my plate. I taught my parents the lesson of who they were dealing with.
I reconnected to skating in my 30s. I worked on the West side of Chicago, and every winter (in the 1990s), they built a skating rink downtown called Skate on State. It was free and at times, depending on the weather and holidays, it could be packed or gloriously empty. I fell in love with skating. I spent the winter walking across the Loop to skate then riding the red line home to Addison Street.
Here was a sport that I could do that did not include being picked last, where I did not get shuttled out to left field to pull up weeds and dread that a ball came in my direction- where I could feel a sense of joy and touch some tiny bit of graceful movement.
It was a revelation.
And then life happened. You know, children, family, and jobs intervened. We lived in places that were far from a skating rink. Two decades later, the children grew up, and sometimes there is no happy ending, there’s just an ending. I was looking for a place that I could call home.
And I found that place on the ice.
Maybe part of the aging process is learning you don’t have to be the best at something. I am old enough to embrace the suck. In this world, we are constantly pushed to be competitive, beat the other guy, and see winners as heroic.
I have reached the stage where struggling in the corners is enough for me. Just getting out there, pushing this 60-year-old body, doing something few would dare, is enough for me.
Through my will and determination, I convinced a coach to take me under her wing. I am a lousy student. Heck, I am not even a mediocre figure skater. And maybe it’s a ridiculous expenditure, but I am passionate about being out there on the ice.
My coach is exasperating; she pushes me and scares the heck out of me. And yet, she’s one of the most genuine, kind human beings I have ever known. She’s tall and beautiful, skated with Disney on Ice, and, most importantly, believes in me. And in a cynical, bitter world, that means a lot. My life is richer because she is my friend.
When you are an adult, the ice is so very hard; it’s pretty much like cold, beautiful concrete. To understand the danger here, let’s review the physics of figure skating. Kinetic energy is measured as Mass times Velocity Squared. I am not a petite person. Big mass and considerable velocity equal big ugly bruises that linger.
When you rent recreational skates, they have flat blades. They don’t have something that professional skate blades have: a rocker. The Rocker enables a skater to spin, change direction, etc., simply by pivoting on the ball of her foot. It’s a subtle shift of your weight from your heel to the ball of your foot.
It requires finesse.
And that finesse is so difficult for me. I have always thrown myself into life, knowing my stubbornness will see me through. With skating, that approach is foolish, dangerous even. So, it’s a lesson in patience, humility, and being 100% present in the moment.
Skating touches my center, my ground, and it’s there that I find my place in the world. For someone who always felt like she was an uncoordinated human being, it’s a release. Every week of the year brings joy when I step out on the ice; it scares me and thrills me. It’s beautiful and dangerous, pushing my comfort zone and reminding me what it means to be alive.
