Learning the Hard Way

My coach tells me to try a double loop. My legs shake and the voice in my head starts telling me that I’m going to fall. Timidly, I glide backwards on my left foot as I reach my right toe pick into the ice. I snap my hips into the jump.

My foot hits the ice again. My head drops. My body crumbles into a pile until I am lying with my back on the ice and looking up at my coach who is giving me pointers.

“Do it again. This time keep your head up. It will help your balance,” she tells me.

Following her instructions, I get up again and try the jump one more time. I fall. Again.

I’m a figure skater. I started skating in the Carriage Club Ice Show when I was five. I started competing and moving up levels when I was nine, but it wasn’t until I was fourteen that I started letting myself fall.

Now, every time I fall, I see it as an accomplishment. But three years ago, I was afraid of falling.

Falling once during a practice meant that I gave up.  I was too scared to try again. I didn’t want to fall and that meant I wouldn’t let myself jump.

My coaches told me that I needed to learn to fall. That if I didn’t learn, I would never become a better skater. Without falling, I couldn’t learn new jumps or push myself to get better.

So I had a choice: fall or fail. I thought it would be easy.

“Haley, just fall.” I said this to myself thousands of times, each time I set up for a jump.  But, as soon as my feet left the ice, I came back down, looking around the rink to see who saw me chicken out.

I was embarrassed and frustrated and desperately wanted to fall.

First, I had to learn that falling out of a jump didn’t hurt as much as I thought. Second and most importantly, I had to learn to trust myself.

My coach gave me “falling lessons.” She would tell me to try a jump that I could already do. The catch was that I had to make myself fall at the end.

I did a waltz jump, the easiest jump I know. When I landed it, I just sat down on the ice. It wasn’t what my coach had in mind, and definitely wasn’t falling.

One day at practice, my friend Lilly got on the ice right behind me for our warm up. She chased me around the ice. Each lap, as she got closer, I started to panic more. I knew what was coming. Laughing when she caught me, she shoved me over. As I slid across the ice, I realized nothing was broken. I was alive. The sting of hitting the ice went away before I stood up. It didn’t hurt to fall.

The next problem was learning to trust myself. My coaches told me that I had the ability to do the jumps they were teaching me, I just needed to let myself try the jumps, instead of wimping out each time I skated into them.

My coach had me try my axel, a one and a half rotation jump, while wearing a harness. That way she would be able to pull me up before I fell. For the first few months, she would help me with the jump, holding me in the air for long enough to complete my rotations. The more jumps I did wearing the harness, the less she helped. Finally I was jumping completely on my own, only wearing the harness to help me to trust myself. Then, I took the harness off and jumped in the exact spot where I would with the harness, imagining I was wearing it.

I finally began to land the axel on my own. When I didn’t land it, I’d fall. And I’d get back up and try again.

I struggled with my fear for a long time; I still do. But I know it’s getting better and all of my “falling practices” are paying off.

My coach once told me that you couldn’t be considered a figure skater until you had fallen out of a jump from mid-air and hit the ice.

During a practice about a year ago, she asked me to try a double flip, even though I had never practiced them before. I was feeling confident that day, and skated to the middle of the ice to try the jump. I jumped. I fell. And I hit the ice. Hard.

I got back up and jumped again. I fell. But, sitting in the middle of the rink, I realized that I hadn’t thought twice about trying the jump again after my first fall. The fall hadn’t phased me. Finally, I felt like a skater.

Slowly, I have built trust in myself. I have learned that falling doesn’t hurt as long as I get back up and try again.

Fall or fail. I decided to fall.