Canadians (day 2-4)

 

Hello again everyone,

Sorry this is so much later then I hoped. I had planned to do a post for every day but things just got so busy!

Just a warning, this one might be a long one!

Everything that happened before yesterday seems boring in comparison now, but I’ll fill you in anyways.

Friday (day 2)

On Friday we had another two practices, that was three days ago and I barely remember them by now. Out of the two of us, Thomas is the one with the memory for these kinds of things :p. You could ask me what our score was from this event, let alone past events, and I wouldn’t be able to tell you. Anyways, I’m pretty sure the two practices went well since nothing bad really sticks out in my mind other than a close call with Paul and Piper, which was my bad… oops!

I was able to catch the men’s short on Friday and was very proud of my BC team mate Liam Firus for his first ever triple axel in competition! Liam and I have grown up together in skating, as he would say we did our “first ever international together” in Calgary at the CODA competition back in 2003 (needless to say it was not an international.. these were the pre-juvenile days when I was still free skating). Since then it seems like our skating career paths have been parallel. We competed at our first ever JGP together in 2009 in Minsk, Belarus. The next season we competed and won our first JGP medals in Sheffield, Britain. We won our next and only other JGP medals together the following year in Brisbane, Australia. We were both Canadian Junior champions (he beat me to it by one year). We did our last ever JGP together (and bombed miserably) but we were able to redeem ourselves at our last ever Jr. Worlds back in Minsk, Belarus where our real international careers began. We both finished 6th last year at nationals less than a point away from 5th and the national team. This year the goal for both him and Thomas and I was to make national team, which we did! So there is some rather useless background history for you :p

Also in the men’s short, my heart broke for fellow team mate and good friend Jeremy Ten for his 7th place short program, meaning he would not be in the final flight the next day. Thomas and I were in that position last year and it’s not fun 😦

This moves us to…..

Saturday!

FINALLY the competition began for us! Thomas and I were very pleased with how our short dance went. The crowd at the Hershey Center was fantastic, so energetic and we loved that they clapped along to our country short dance. It really makes a difference when the audience responds that way. When an audience claps along to your music it makes us feel like we’re doing our jobs as performers.

Our goal was to break 60 points in the short dance which we accomplished.

Sunday:

Nobody likes waking up early on a Sunday morning, but unfortunately that’s what the schedule called for. Luckily I had enough time to take a quick nap between practice and competition since the baby in the room next door to me decided to spend half the night wailing and screaming, keeping me up all night.

While cooling down after our practice, it felt so weird to be congratulating all the men’s ladies and pairs skaters who were there for their gala practices. Knowing that they had been done since yesterday and we still had one more to go was such an unfamiliar feeling to me. I have never been the last event to finish before, but I think I did an okay job at staying focused on the competition.

Now came the time to compete… finally. I have never skated for such a packed house (except for maybe in Japan, but I think skating for a home crowd is a little different, even though the Japanese fans are absolutely incredible!). I had so much fun skating the free dance! And Thomas and I (and Megan and Aaron) were all so happy with our scores. Our goal was to break 90 in the free and we met that goal.

The exhibition gala was a complete gong show. Since we had no idea we would be skating in it I had no dress to wear, fortunately one of the moms was able to run back to the hotel and get me Caelen Dalmers short dance dress. We learned the finale number backstage as the show was starting and had all of 10 minutes to re learn our own show number from NHK (which even there we kind of had no idea what we were doing). Needless to say our exhibition performance was far from perfect but we had fun anyways! We had a lot of fun skating in the finale number as well, I’m just glad I managed to remember all the choreography! I think (I hope) that the audience had fun too!

Placing 3rd exceeded all of our expectations for this weekend. I am still in shock. We were all very surprised. Thomas and I realize that all of our competitors are extremely talented and beautiful skaters but some unfortunate mistakes were made which allowed a door to be opened for Thomas and I, and it all came down to consistency. Thomas and I are very proud of how we skated and our bronze medal. Standing on the podium next to Tessa and Scott is something I thought I would never get to experience. We are absolutely over the moon. We are so looking forward to competing at Four Continents in Japan.

Thomas and I would like to thank all of the volunteers at the 2013 Canadian National Figure Skating championships, as well as the fans who came out to watch all the events! Us athletes could never do it without you.

I would like to congratulate all the athletes who competed this week and hope to see you all next year!

And finally I would like to thank Melanie Hoyt and ice-dance.com for giving me this opportunity to be a guest blogger for them!

Look for some new blog posts in a couple weeks about the 4CCs!

Until then,

-N

Canadians Day 1

Day 1 (for me at least)

Melanie, at ice-dance.com has asked me to be a guest blogger for them this weekend at Canadians. I’ll admit I’m a little nervous, but I’m also very excited to be blogging for ice-dance.com!!! (this one is not up yet but hopefully it will be soon!)

Let me start out by saying a HUGE CONGRATULATIONS to my fellow ice dancers and team mates Spencer Soo/Danielle Wu, Brianna Dalmaestro/Graeme Gordon and Alexa Linden/Tyler Miller for sweeping the novice dance podium!

Alright, so, as senior dance is the last event this weekend we were the last of the team BC/YT members to arrive. We flew in Wednesday evening. As we turned on our phones we were eager to find out how our junior dancers had done in the short dance and we were pleased to find out that they were sitting in 2nd and 3rd. Later in the team room we watched the final flight of Junior Ladies compete where I’m happy to say fellow BC/YT Teammate Larkyn Austman took the gold!! But I’m not going to count this as my “day 1”

Day 1 starts on Thursday, our first day of practice. We had one unofficial practice in the morning and one official practice. On our first practice it was just Thomas and I and our friends and teammates Larissa Van As and Troy Shindle. Later we had our official practice. We were on the ice with the others skating in the final flight and the energy on practice was fantastic! More of a sense of camaraderie then that of competitors, although I’m sure that will change as the days progress :p. I am so excited, proud and honored to be skating in the final flight with such amazing skaters for the short dance this year at Canadians, even though the event is such a small event. Thomas and I spent most of the season hoping that we would be skating in the final flight for the Short Dance (and hopefully the free!) this year.

Thursday evening we watched the end of the junior dance event. Having both our BC teams skate back to back could be one of the most emotionally intense and stressful things I’ve ever experienced. As one of the older skaters at our rink I feel like I’m their big sister (in Maddies case, we used to actually be confused as sisters before I started dying my hair). Since I’ve known all four of our junior dancers since they basically were babies, I feel such a sense of pride when I watch them… #proudmama. Caelen and Shane had the perfect ending to their season, after a series of unfortunate events that have always seemed to keep them off the podium at nationals they finally made it! And I couldn’t be happier for them! I was a blubbering mess after they skated but I calmed down enough to be able to see Maddie and Zhao Kai through my tears. Both our teams skated beautifully and Maddie and Zhao Kai took the gold, I’m so proud of both of them!

Then it set in…… all the BC dancers are done competing and we haven’t even started… and we didn’t even get to start the next day! Just another day of two practices which I’ll write about tomorrow!

That’s it for now, thanks for reading! 🙂

Cheers,

N

2012: The Good, The Bad and The Ugly

This might be very cliché but this is my post about the year 2012, all things skating and non skating related (what little non skating related things there are :p)

This year might be one of the most roller coaster types of years I’ve ever had. I can safely say that 2012 brought with it the lowest lows I’ve experienced in my life and the highest highs.

The following is a short list of some of my important events of 2012:

– first time as seniors at the Canadian Championships, what an amazing experience!
– Second trip to Jr. Worlds and Belarus, and achieved a new PB
– rekindled an old friendship
– first senior internationals
– passed the first year threshold in school! (… a year and a half late..)
– I started a new decade of my life, I turned 20
– I lost someone very close to my heart
– I took my first real vacation since I sold my soul to figure skating many many years ago. I went to Greece to visit family 😀
– I got my full drivers license (on the first try!!!!!!!!!!)

Despite some of the sad moments, all in all 2012 was a great year, bringing with it so many new experiences that I will never forget. Although I had to face many challenges, both physical and emotional adversary I think I have ended this year as a stronger person because of it. I’m so excited for what 2013 holds for me, all the new experiences and challenges I will face!

On a side note, I can’t believe nationals is in two weeks! I’m getting so excited, I can’t wait to compete 😀

…

So Happy New Year to everyone and may 2013 bring you all good fortune!

-N

NHK 2012

We have recently returned home from Sendai, Japan, where we competed in the 2012 NHK Trophy.

I’ll start off by saying that this was, yet again, an amazing experience! I had so much fun!! 🙂 Right away I felt really solid, even on the first practice, I felt like I got into the groove of things much faster then in Russia. 

We felt like we skated the short dance much better then we did in Russia and when the marks came up we were a little disappointed since we hoped to improve on our score from Russia. However we were presently surprised when it turned out that it was enough to put us in 4th place and into the final flight the following day for the free dance!

Practicing with Meryl and Charlie and the other big guys the next day was so exciting! I’ll admit I was pretty star struck, but I think we handled it well. We were really pleased with our free dance and very happy with the scores! We were excited about getting the level 4 on our spin, which we only got a 3 on in Russia. Being able to hang on to that 4th place spot was really exciting! Our goal at this competition was to be 4th and we are just so happy that we were able to achieve that!

We got to take part in the exhibition gala which was really fun, only down side is that we had no show program! We had to choreograph it off the ice the night before, and then hope that it worked out on the ice the next day! Thankfully it did!

All in all I really enjoyed Japan, the fans were amazing and so high energy, it was so much fun to skate for them! And the people in general were so polite and hospitable, we all felt really welcomed there.

Some other interesting things that happened on this trip were of course the 3 earthquakes that happened within 24 hours! They ranged from somewhere in the 4s-5s on the Richter scale, so these were pretty decent sized earthquakes! One thing you should know is that next to spiders, earthquakes are my next biggest fear. The biggest one happened the morning of the SD at around 5:30 in the morning when I was getting ready for practice, it happened and then I don’t think I stopped shaking until we arrived at the rink a few hours later! It was terrifying for me! The first one happened on our first night there and I slept through it luckily, and the last one happened the afternoon of the SD, between practice and competition, this one was not as bad as the one earlier that morning.

Another fun story that some of you may not know is that Thomas and I were actually skating on old skates at this competition!! Our skates were taken away from us by airport security in Moscow and we had to leave them there!! Our team leader, Mike Slipchuck, and others at Skate Canada worked really hard to try and get our skates to us in time for Japan but unfortunately they arrived in Vancouver the day AFTER we left for Japan! Fortunately Thomas and I had old skates that were still usable, although Thomas’s were being held together by duct tape. And in the end, everything worked out just fine!

Looking down the road to the rest of our season, we are very excited to continue training and improving for the next month and a half in preparation for Nationals. Our goal this year is a top 5 finish to earn a spot on the National Team, and hopefully a chance to compete at the Four Continents Championships which is back in Japan!!

Until next time,

N

Cup of Russia 2012

Sorry for this delay, I said I would post again soon, but I got a bit behind on school work and needed to catch up!

For all those interested I will recap my experience at the 2012 Cup of Russia.

Let me start by saying that this was an incredible experience and I’m so thankful for the opportunity! This was our first ever Grand Prix event and we were lucky to be there with fellow teammates Tessa Virtue/Scott Moir, Paige Lawrence/Rudi Swiegers and Patrick Chan.

Our first day there we had one practice which went very well, considering we had just done something like 24 hours of travel the day before. My roommate Paige told me the rink looked like Lego land, and she was right!!

The colorful seats were a little disorienting but after a while I didn’t even notice them. We had another practice the next day, the day of the short dance, which was also a good one. Then finally came time to compete! The 5 minute warm up is when I first started to feel like my body belonged to me again. Skating out there was such a great experience and the crowd was amazing! We had so much fun with our short dance and were really happy with our levels and our score :). The next day we competed the free dance and we were very happy that we didn’t have to skate first. Unfortunately we had a slight stumble in our diagonal step sequence resulting in a level one and minus GOE but other than that we felt like it was a strong performance. Our scores were not quite what we hoped but now we know what we have to work on for next time!

One of the highlights of this event for me was just being part of the team. It was so cool to be just hanging out with some of the athletes I’ve looked up to in the last couple years. I feel so lucky and thankful that I had the opportunity to get to know them and I can’t wait for our next Grand Prix in Japan next week!!

I’ll be posting about that one too, hopefully there wont be such a delay!

Until next time,

-N

First Post!

Hi!

This is my first post ever, I’m new to this blogging thing so I’m not exactly sure how this is supposed to work. I recently did an informational seminar called the Athlete Advance held by the Canadian Sport Center Pacific and it focused a lot on social media. After learning about all that I thought it would be a great idea and lots of fun to start a blog to share my experiences with you… whoever you is? :p

Right now I’m in my hotel room in Moscow waiting to go take the bus for our first practice! I’m so excited, I can’t wait to see the rink and get on the ice for the first time here.

Hopefully I’ll get this all figured out soon and be able to make my page a little more visually appealing! More posts coming soon! 🙂

Cheers!

Nicole