Category Archives: Ice Skating

Ice Skating

Learn the Two-foot Grapevine on Inline Skates

Posted on September 15, 2021 by Xinhai Dude 辛亥生

This is a follow-up to my previous article: Learn to Skate the Two-foot Grapevine Analytically from 2016. The first article talked about skating Grapevine on ice. This article discusses how to skate the same Grapevine on inline skates. Almost everything from the first article applies to this article. Thus this article will not repeat the same prerequisite skills and context information about Grapevine that I already covered in the first article. This article will focus on showing differences found when skating this move on pavement, compared to ice. Continue reading →

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Winter Ice Skating at Mohonk Mountain House

Posted on December 13, 2016 by Xinhai Dude 辛亥生

The Mohonk rink is comparable in size to the Winter Village rink at Bryant Park in NYC. This rink does expand greatly the variety of possible winter activities, at the mountain resort where TVs are conspicuously absent in guest rooms. A single rink alone provides three different types of activities. There is the traditional “I just want to skate” type of activity. More inspired folks try the role of chariot horses. But in this case they are more like mules than horses, and push chariots from behind. Less mobile folks may play chariot drivers, except they have little control over their destiny, and must rely on verbal signals which mules may or may not honor.
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Learn to Skate the Two-foot Grapevine Analytically

Posted on May 15, 2016 by Xinhai Dude 辛亥生

Here is my account of how I (almost) learned to skate a two-foot move such as the Grapevine. I am going to describe the learning process in a new language of moment of balance, falling and recovery, unlike how most tutorials explain the move. Perhaps I can provide fresh ideas on learning this move, on two-foot skating and on skating in general, from the perspective of a newbie. I have watched and re-watched countless number of tutorial videos, and have bought and read great books on ice skating written at the turn of the last century. And in analyzing skating and the Grapevine move for this article, I found that I now understand what I was doing wrong, and perhaps can finally learn to Grapevine gracefully.
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Ice Skating as a Sequence of Falling and Recovery Steps

Posted on May 12, 2016 by Xinhai Dude 辛亥生

This article captures the insight I acquired in this process. Perhaps I can provide fresh ideas on learning to skate, from the perspective of a former outsider. The main thesis of this article is that unlike traditional narratives that describes skating moves in terms of strokes, I think skating can be equally and maybe even better explained as a sequence of falling steps and recovery steps.
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