My dream: hangin' out in the lutz corner

This will be more hilarious to my skating friends than to my hippy friends, but I just had to memorialize it here. Last night I had a dream that I was in a kitchen (not my kitchen, but someone else's, I'm not sure whose) practicing off-ice double lutzes in the "lutz corner" (aka just a corner between the cabinets and the kitchen island). They were good too; extremely high and landed cleanly.

So I haven't done a double lutz in probably 30 years and I haven't done off-ice jumps for almost as long. Why the dream, especially when I am now an ice dancer and don't jump? Until I was about 40 I used to do an axel every year on my birthday just to prove I still could, but otherwise not a whole lotta jumping going on until the summer when Tim was injured and I started practicing freestyle, including jumps, just for something to do. Not soon after I started jumping again I was diagnosed with hip dysplasia and that was the end of that. I am not so foolish to compromise my newly reconstructed acetabula by jumping again, so it's not something I plan to do ever again.

But those double lutzes in the dream, even though they were on linoleum and not on ice, sure felt damn good.

So today I did go back to the rink, this time on a public session. I didn't try to do actual ice dances but just worked on basics and did much better. Doing dances is difficult because so much is going on. Basics are not as challenging right now. I found that back crossovers were much easier than forward crossovers. It's hard to lift my operated leg to stroke when going forward but I do OK going backward. I did double 3's (FO/BI and FI/BO) and those were OK. I did lots of 3 turns and mohawks.

Just very basic, basic skating but I had my head up and a bit more extension this time. I still started to have hip flexor pain after about 20 minutes. I know, I know. It is still healing. Perhaps after the next surgery and another 8 weeks on crutches not doing much of anything the hip flexors will heal enough to allow better skating when I am ready to try again.