By Zoe Hsu
For the past few Sundays, Sophomores Shannon Le and Arielle Tan practice the Waltz Jump, one of their favorite ice skating tricks. Their eyes are steady in concentration, and the prospect of falling lingers in the back of their minds as the surface of the cold, hard ice taunts them. After taking in one last shaky breath, they glide forward, swing their legs back and jump into the air moments before both landing elegantly on one heel.
“All the things that have to do with school make me really stressed,” Le said. “When I’m skating, I can forget about all of it.”
Le and Tan started taking beginner classes last February and are currently enrolled in an Adult Workshops class at the Pasadena Ice Skating Center, where they work on technique and tricks at an intermediate level every Sunday. Aside from the Waltz Jump, they strive to master all sorts of tricks ranging from easy forward and backward crossovers to difficult spirals.
Even though ice skating is both enjoyable and stress-relieving for the girls, it is quite a challenging sport for them. They want others to know that figure skating is much more difficult than it looks, and skaters like them practice for several hours and fall countless times before finally executing a trick correctly and smoothly.
“It takes so much practice and even the most basic stuff can be very hard,” Tan said. “With a lot of sports, you can just be rough. With this, it’s really hard because you have to make everything look graceful.”
Despite their love for ice skating, they usually have difficulty finding a ride to the rink because of their parents’ busy schedules, so they do not always have the opportunity to practice as much as they would like to.
“My parents are trying to make me quit because they’re making me choose between indoor drumline and ice skating,” Le said. “I still don’t know which one I’m gonna pick because it’s hard to choose between two things that I like.”
Le and Tan make the most of their time on ice by practicing with each other after class during public sessions. They typically begin their practice by warming up with forward strokes and forward and backward crossovers before proceeding to working on various jumps and footwork. When they learn a new trick, they practice the move against the wall before they feel comfortable enough to perform the trick without the wall’s support.
Although ice skating comes with many hardships, they hope to continue skating for as long as they can with each other and several new friends they met through their skating journey.
They are thinking about becoming assistant coaches in the future to give back to their current teachers and help other young skaters achieve their true potential.
“We certainly have come a long way from the beginning,” Tan said. “I hope one day I will be able to land a double axel. It’s probably impossible, but we support each other, just the two of us.”