Well that's me passed on Level 1 and 2, and to be honest, if I look at
http://www.iceskating.org.uk/index.cfm/learn-to-skate/skate-uk/skate-uk-basic-skills-programme/ then I can pretty much do all of Level 3 too. As such, I've put my lessons on hold to spend a month just consolidating a few things and to try out some Level 3-4 stuff on my own.
I found the Level 1-2 lessons a bit of a breeze to be honest. I was leagues ahead of everybody else in my group (albeit still a modest skillset!) but it just started to feel a bit pointless in going to them as it was not pushing me or testing me at all. Granted, there are still the odd things that I need to improve.
Got a couple of days off this week so am going to head down to Widnes during the day whilst its quiet to practise some things on my own. I might be skipping ahead a little bit but I really want to try and do some forward crossovers. I've been watching some videos online that summarise the basics and I don't think I could learn much different in a paid for group lesson than I would from YouTube so I'm going to strike out on my own for a bit. Once I feel like I've consolidated a few more skills I'll look in to getting some more lessons in.
I've been trying forward crossovers on corners as I was getting incredibly frustrated at the ends of the rink in losing speed by basically forward gliding or forward stroking round the corners, instead of generating speed and power through the turn. I have by no means mastered this yet but I do the odd one and it sort of clicks into making sense but I need to practise it a lot more. It kind of feels like a controlled fall in some ways...I don't know if that's how everybody else feels? But in that controlled fall you can preserve/generate more speed and it feels good when I pull off a good one.
Still a bit clumsy in stopping too. I can stop slow-medium speeds, but I can't do an "insta-stop" in an emergency situation for instance, so I need to keep practising that too. Its good though, I feel like lots of progress is made each time I set skate on the ice.
One thing I've noticed recently is that my right foot doesn't seem as dextrous as my left, which I was surprised by as I am right footed. For instance, with forwards lemons my left foot can nicely glide out and back in, whereas my right foot can tend to be a bit clunky and often scrape the ice instead of gently change direction and glide back in. In first noticed it when my girlfriend films me whilst going backwards, my left foot seemingly did much more of the work than the more rigid right foot. Its food for thought and I need to concentrate more on what the right foot is doing and make it pull its weight a bit more!