Not managing to ice skate much at the moment, but did go quad rolling recently with some friends. The first thing I noticed was that I'm so used to having a lot of balance support from the blade extending out behind the heel on a figure skate that I was alarmed at how little weight you can put in the heel of the boot on a quad roller. As you've only got the back wheels for support (which are just under the heel) then you really can't push your weight too far back on them or your foot just shoots out from under you!
It was had to find a spot in the quad rollers that was comfortable resting my whole weight on, whereas I can trivially stand at rest on ice without any concern - genuinely had no idea how much the bit sticking out the back of a figure skate helped with that!
Some moves were familiar, for instance crossovers were much the same action but forward was hard to do well while backward was suprisingly easy despite the lack of blade under my heel to support me - I wasn't anywhere near as stable as I am on the ice though. I found that my basic stroking on quad rollers emulated my stroking in figure skates in that I tend to rest on an outside edge, so I was always doing little C shapes as I stroked around the roller rink. I think this was actually really destabilising for my balance, but it was my natural inclination carrying over from the ice. I had a bash at backward stroking and this was actually harder than the backward crossovers. We had a girl with us that had been learning for a while and she was trying to teach me the half-lemon method where you would pump one foot while letting the other do the steering. I've never been a huge fan of this on ice and I found it hard in quad rollers, but after a little persistence then I managed to get off some solid basic stroking without the half lemon method - the hard part was trusting all my weight into one skate as I let the other leave the ground for the stroke - something I'm fine at on ice but didn't know the balance well enough on a quad roller for. Lemons were bizarrely difficult as well, though I remember learning those in figure skating and there's a lot going into them that you don't really appreciate until later and I think I was struggling to engage that knowledge in a quad roller.
I know there're 3 turns in quad rollers and I did attempt a few by the barrier (my forward outside 3 turns are very strong on ice) but they were terrifyingly hard on quad rollers, I didn't have the balance confidence to get a strong enough edge going into them and the turn was just yuck as well not knowing where the weight should be as you pivot.
Overall I was pretty pleased at how fast I picked it up, particularly compared to the other newbies in our group, but there's no way in hell I'm giving up the blades
Also I was sweating ABSOLUTE BUCKETS by the end, maintaining the foreign balance style was really hard work and my posture was a mess trying to keep me up, I think I was doing a proper neanderthal pose most of the time
Anyone else enjoyed putting their figure skating into some quad rolling (or vice versa)?
