After you skate for a while, you become an amphibian of movement. You adapt to the freedom and speed of it all, and the momentum of ice becomes as natural as walking. Sometimes, when I haven’t gotten rink time for a bit, I can feel the physical itch to get back on ice. It’s all I can think about.
Ironically, the first time I stepped on an ice rink, I hated it.
My mom — who taught herself how to roller skate in her youth — thought it was about time her kid toughened up via her method of absolutely beefing it a few times. She took me to a public skate session at our local rink. Both of us were in rentals, so my feet hurt like crazy, and about halfway through the session my mom took me to the center of the rink and took away my walker. If I wanted it back, she told me, I had to learn how to skate on my own. I almost cried.
Admittedly, the imposed trauma yielded results. I very quickly learned how to skate. Even though I was thoroughly scarred, my mom signed me up for the basic skill program. I was short for my age and had a surprising jump height for my stature. In a few lessons, I fell in love with the feeling of being on ice. As I approached the end of the basic skills lineup, a coach suggested to my mom to continue with private lessons.
The difference between taking private lessons and basic skills is that when you’re with an individual coach, you’re one of theirs. Your reputation as a skater is your coach’s reputation. As instructors, having competitive students means that they’re capable of pushing their students to win, which attracts more students. This means that coaches are motivated to focus primarily on the students who do well, and when lessons can go for rates up to a dollar an hour, a student needs to ensure the attention of their coach. It’s a terrible environment to grow up in — bruises, cuts and trips to physical therapy were medals of honor proving how hard you had pushed yourself, and as I hit puberty and shot up to an average height (50th percentile baby!), I also dealt with a lot of the standard body image and negative feelings about food that come with performing arts.
At the same time, though, the rush of the sport was unlike anything else. To be a figure skater, you have to be some degree of an adrenaline junkie. Throughout my life, I have tried everything from roller coasters to snowboarding, but nothing quite matches the feeling of flying through the air at high speeds in the fluorescent glow and bone-deep chill of an ice rink. You feel invincible like nothing can catch you. Even when I switched from the competitive scene to USFS testing, it was the thrill and flair of it all that kept me going through every awful moment.
At some point in any skater’s career, you reach a skill cap — the only way to overcome it is to dedicate more time, which means more money. The fiscal barrier of the performing arts is another conversation altogether, but it’s safe to say that the mounting financial burden of improving was becoming an issue. The initial, simple joy had degraded over the years and become entangled with a lot of stress, anxiety and spite toward the sport. Did I really want to go to high school online to spend more time at the rink? Did I want to ruin my joints at the age of 16 and never eat sugar again? Did I want to spend another five years being told that nothing I did was good enough, before I inevitably became too old for the sport before I could even drink?
Right before the pandemic started, I took a series of bad falls while working on my double axel. At that point, I was the only person in my rink I knew who hadn’t been in the emergency room or physical therapy, and the specter of permanent injury loomed closer than ever. When the rinks closed due to the COVID-19 pandemic, I decided to simply not go back.
In retrospect, I needed to quit. Unlike some of the people I skated with, going pro was never in my cards, so going down that path would have ultimately been futile. At the time, though, quitting sucked. So much. With everything shut down, I went from doing rigorous, high-adrenaline activities four out of five weekdays to being stuck in my house 24/7. I would not recommend. It was absolutely disastrous for my mental health on top of your average quarantine ennui. I was also left alone with a lot of complex feelings about quitting and the feeling that I somehow betrayed my coaches and club — I still don’t really skate at my old rink out of fear of burned bridges. After the pandemic, I didn’t step back on ice for another two years.
Once again, my mom was the one who got me back on the ice. With the excuse of wanting me to get more exercise, she dug up my old skates and sent me off to a public ice session at Yost Ice Arena. This time, she told me to just have fun, get some cardio and not do anything stupid because, by god, was I rusty. It turns out that, although the muscle memory of ice never left me fully, it definitely took a vacation. I slowly worked through my warm-ups, footwork, spins and jumps. I felt the old flames on my back to be better, jump higher, and make sure I hadn’t lost all the skills I could once do.
Then, I did something stupid. Hubris got to me and I tried something I shouldn’t have: a flying sit spin that I wasn’t even that secure on two years before. I absolutely ate it, face-first onto the ice. Turns out I got to join the ER club after all, just a few years late. Surprisingly, I didn’t feel any dread or anxiety, like I would have before; there were no stakes in terms of not being able to practice or having to face my coaches. For the first time in a decade, I could laugh off my mistake as nothing deeper than a misjudgment. When the ER nurse finished sewing my lip back together, the only question I had, with blood flaking off my chin, was when I could get back on the ice.
Needless to say, I learned a lesson that day. I was determined, though, to keep my momentum going. When I came back to campus this year, I painted my skating bag. It’s a pretty standard navy blue duffle, and to that blank canvas, I took a paintbrush and painted my name in full metal-band-logo-font, jagged spikes and lightning and all. The dried paint felt like a twofold promise to myself: to commit to skating for the following year if not just to use my sick new bag and to skate for myself. It’s been a process to make peace with never being competitive again; when I see training figure skaters fly across the ice, I deal with that pang of envy by reminding myself that I should not try whatever they’re doing lest I end up in the ER again (figure skaters are like puffins; mimicry is our natural way to make friends). Sometimes I can’t help but feel like after a decade of work, all I was left with was financial guilt and a knee that sometimes gives out when it’s about to rain.
If I could redo it, though, I wouldn’t change a thing. Figure skating taught me how to be disciplined, determined and cutthroat when needed. It taught me how to know my limits and push them further, how to be a competitor and performer. Quitting taught me the joys of sleeping in and eating whatever I want and being unabashedly unserious about something. It taught me how to be a person and how to be that for me, first and only. In the end, I like to think I walked away with a good deal; I get a hobby with incredible amounts of rizz (I don’t get it but the masses thirst for figure skating I guess?), 5 a.m.-ice-rink-hardened cold resistance and most importantly, I get to whole-heartedly love my sport again.
Daily Arts Writer Lin Yang can be reached at yanglinj@umich.edu.