Ice Skating to Greatness

We know sea king football, we know seaking basketball, but there is also sea king figure skating.

Out of school hours, in the independent study P.E program, Alana Mendez, a sophomore at PVHS, figure skates.

It was on her third birthday she was watching the winter olympics, and she fell in love with figure skating.

After a couple years in first grade she began to figure skate after resigning from gymnastics due to her constantly moving and not having a gym nearby.

She has since been figure skating for eight years; however, in fifth grade there was a two year period where she wasn’t ice skating.

She stopped ice skating because in fifth grade she moved to France where she couldn’t find an ice skating rink to train at.

Of course there were ice skating rinks but all of them were reserved for Frances beloved sport called ice dancing, which is different from figure skating.

However, after returning to the United States, she went back to ice skating.

Most of us non-ice skaters are probably always wondering how these people would wear these tiny outfits and not be afraid to hit the ice.

As it turns out, when Mendez and other ice skaters are learning new tricks or moves, they wear special clothes.

These special clothes come equip with patting that reduces the pain should the figure skater fall and hit the ice.

But as Mendez also said, most figure skaters start very slow when learning a new move.

They usually tend to go much faster as they become more comfortable with their newly learned trick.

Yet, falling is inevitable. All figure skaters fall.

It’s part of the sport everyone just gets back up and tries again. Alana Mendez sometimes can be scared while figure skating, when her blades are dull, but otherwise she is fearless.

She gets this fearless inspiration from Yulia Lipnitskaya, a fifteen year old russian figure skater who made the Olympics in 2014.

Watching her compete in the olympics-making the minimum age requirement by only 26 days- has been a driving force for Mendez’s figure skating career.

She plans to take her career not much farther than high school.

Mendez hopes to enter a competition every once in a while but for her figure skating will be nothing more than a hobby after graduating from PVHS in 2020.

Although her figure skating will be coming to an end after high school, the life lessons she has learned will never be lost.

From figure skating, the most important life lesson she has learned is perseverance. Hitting the ice and getting back up has shown parallelism to when heartbreaking events happen in life.

She accepts that it happened and moves on. She has also learned the importance of trying new things from learning multiple moves in figure skating.

There are several different moves to know and try.

This idea of trying new things will carry over to later parts of her life.

From life lessons to mastering exotic moves, it is easy to say that Alana Mendez is as cool as ice.