Finding the Edge

by Karen Chen

  CHAPTER 5

  PUSHING THROUGH

  FROM THAT POINT ON, SKATING PRETTY MUCH consumed my family’s entire life—even Jeffrey eventually gave in to his figure-skating destiny: around 2012 when he was ten, he put away his video games and began to train as a skater. If Jeffrey and I weren’t at school, we were either at the rink or driving to or from the rink. And in the car, Jeffrey and I watched skating DVDs. We had recordings of the 1998 Nagano Olympics and some World Championships, and we watched them over and over. Jeffrey was obsessed with Evgeni Plushenko, the Russian skater who was a four-time Olympic medalist, three-time World champion, seven-time European champion, four-time Grand Prix Final champion, and ten-time Russian national champion. Our whole family would sit on the couch and watch Evgeni’s performances after eating dinner and before going to bed.

  I fiercely admired Michelle Kwan, two-time Olympic medalist, five-time World champion, and nine-time US champion. I think it was my dad who found the book she wrote, Heart of a Champion, and gave it to me. In it, she talks about how when the Zamboni would come out to clean the ice, she would tell the driver, “Just give me one more minute. I still want to do this move, and this jump, and this routine,” and it’s stuck with me ever since. Before I can leave the ice, I feel like I should do one more of this, one more of that. Afterward, I’m finally satisfied with myself and with my effort, and I’m ready to pack up, go home, and prepare to start again the next day.

  Through my twice-daily practices, I continued to develop and add to my skills, and the US Figure Skating Tests were key indicators for my development. These tests set the national standard for skills. Your highest test passed determines the level you enter in a competition. It’s kind of like karate, where an athlete progresses through the different belts, ultimately aiming to achieve a black belt. In skating, what you want to achieve is the senior level. On your way to senior, there are seven levels: pre-preliminary, preliminary, pre-juvenile, juvenile, intermediate, novice, junior, and then senior. Each level increases in difficulty, and builds on the techniques from the earlier ones. The skating club I joined in Fremont—the Peninsula Skating Club—organized tests at our rink, Sharks Ice, and on the testing days, three US Figure Skating Association (USFSA) judges would visit and grade our test patterns.

  There are two testing tracks sanctioned by the USFSA, each with the eight levels within it. The first testing track is called Moves in the Field, and it’s a baseline test to make sure a skater has all her fundamental skills, like posture, strength, power, edge quality, and quickness. The tests consist of four to six patterns that must be completed clockwise and counterclockwise, on both feet, and on both the inside and outside edges. I did this first test when I was six, and three years later when I was nine, I passed my senior-level moves in the field test. Once I had passed all those basic skills tests, I moved on to the second testing track: the free skate progression. The free skate tests move through the same eight levels, but test harder elements like jumps and spins—components that are performed in competitive programs. The level of free skate test a skater has passed determines a competition category.

  Because progression has to do with mastery of all skating elements, age isn’t necessarily a factor. However, I did stand out for passing my senior-level fundamental tests at the age of nine. And then, as I began entering (and winning!) more and more local and regional preliminary and pre-juvenile competitions, I attracted plenty of attention. Unlike when I was skating with Crystal and people good-naturedly commented about her feet being longer than my legs, not everything being said about me at this point in my life was sweet. Sherri stopped my mom and me in the parking lot one night after practice. “Your child is exceptional,” Sherri said, looking straight into my mom’s eyes. “I think she’s going to go far. You’re going to deal with a lot of stuff. Parents will talk about her because she stands out, and not everyone is nice. They don’t say nice things always.”

  Multiple doctors and physical therapists have told me that I have an extremely high pain tolerance, which is both good and bad. It’s good because I can tolerate discomfort and push through. It’s bad because sometimes I don’t listen to my body when it’s telling me I need to stop pushing. Instead, I talk over it: Oh, this is perfectly okay. It’s normal. Keep going. Don’t be lazy. I believe most competitive athletes have the ability to overcome some pain. For me, it’s hard to find the perfect equation between overcoming my pain and respecting that pain means something is wrong. That particular balance has always been a bit of a struggle for me.

  When I was nine, I broke my right ankle for the first time. The day I broke it, I was in a Saturday training session, running through one of my programs. By the final few minutes, I was exhausted. But I wanted to do my program one more time. Push through, I told myself. You’re not lazy.

  I had this combination—a jump into a spin—called a death drop. The death drop is a flying spin, and you need a deep edge to push powerfully into the takeoff. Your arms help lift you off the ice, and then both legs are split, parallel to the ice. The landing requires you to dig the tip of your toe pick in hard, burying it into the ice, and then you end up in a sit spin.

  When I landed, something cracked. I couldn’t hold my toe for the proper landing, and I slammed into the ice, my right ankle catching the fall. It was really painful. It was pain I couldn’t forget about, talk away, or push through. This time, something was definitely wrong.

  We went to the emergency room for X-rays and found out that a tiny piece of bone had chipped out of my ankle. That little piece was now floating around in my ankle somewhere. The only way to reattach the bone was surgery, but reattaching it wasn’t actually necessary, so we just left it to float. (To this day you can still feel a bump where the tissue has grown all around it.) Even though I didn’t need surgery, I did have to take time off to heal. It was the first period of my life I wasn’t allowed to skate, and I was very sad. Physically and emotionally, I wanted to be on the ice.

  But I knew I had to rest. The best shot I had of getting back into the rink as soon as possible was listening to my body (for once) and taking it easy. I took my rehab so seriously that when my family traveled to Taiwan during my winter break from school, I didn’t even walk around. When my family went fishing and hiking, my dad carried me.

  One of my grandmothers had gifted me a jade necklace when I was born, but my mother had never given it to me and I had never worn it. In Taiwanese culture, jade necklaces are supposed to bring luck, and they are handed down from generation to generation. “When I was a little girl,” my mother explained, “my mom gave me a jade necklace. I felt safe wearing it.”

  After I broke my ankle, my mother remembered that I had a jade necklace. She found it, gave it to me, and told me to wear it and never take it off.

  CHAPTER 6

  MAKING SACRIFICES

  GILLEY USED TO ASK ALL HIS STUDENTS, “WHAT IS your goal?”

  Their answer was often the same: “I want to go to the Olympics.”

  Even in his grandfatherly way, Gilley didn’t beat around the bush: “Then you better buy your tickets now. They’re pretty hard to get.”

  And that’s the harsh, true reality of the whole thing. Everyone wants to make it to the Olympics, to the top of the podium. Actually getting there is another thing entirely.

  But if you were prepared to sacrifice, to give everything you had in order to make it to the Olympics, Gilley said there was no secret formula other than work, work, work. “It’s really simple,” he told me once. “If you’re playing the piano, you have to know the keys. Stretch your fingers out and hit the keys. To do it, you rehearse it over and over. Skating is the same. It’s rehearsal. Over and over. Tick, tick, tick.”

  From Gilley I learned that champions make a habit of doing what most people find boring or uncomfortable. Seemingly simple acts, like packing my bag for the rink each day, were specialized to a science. Just like my fifth-grade planner, I kept almost everything in my life neat and organized.
(My bedroom was another story, and my mom thankfully let it go. She says you have to express yourself somehow!) My skating bag was always stuffed with extra layers of clothing like vests and scarves, as well as quick and easy snacks, like fresh fruit (my favorite). Back then, I used something called a ZÜCA—all the kids at the rink had them. Imagine a locker on wheels: rolling luggage but sportier. I developed a system to make sure everything had its own compartment in the ZÜCA, streamlined and simple.

  As ice skaters, we already have plenty of external challenges. Simply getting out on the ice is one of them. Unlike most youth sports, skating isn’t taught or practiced in school. You have to do it before and after school, and you have to find a rink that has available ice time, which is limited and expensive. Ice time is precious. That’s why Sherri was always so strict; we didn’t have the luxury of horsing around.

  More and more, competitive skaters (like Michelle Kwan and Tara Lipinski—my idols, who I grew up watching and reading about) were no longer enrolled in traditional schools, instead hiring tutors so they could practice more regularly and travel to exhibitions and competitions throughout the year. Someone like Kristi Yamaguchi—my childhood hero—was becoming the exception. Kristi, who won an Olympic gold medal in 1992, graduated from Mission San Jose, a public high school in our shared hometown of Fremont.

  My parents and I began talking about my dreams, including the best way to achieve them. I was winning local competitions, and Gilley and Sherri both said that to become competitive on a national level, which was what I was wanting more and more, sacrifices had to be made. Already, the family alarm clock was set before dawn, and homework was my regular lunch-table companion—but it still wasn’t enough.

  You might recall my fifth-grade homeroom teacher, Mrs. Mead. At this point, she and my mom started discussing the possibility of homeschooling me. By now my passion to skate and my dream to pursue mastery of my craft were well known. Even if I didn’t speak much, my actions did. I didn’t ask myself if I could be an elite skater—I believed I could be one. So I asked how to become an elite skater, what other sacrifices I had to make. Mrs. Mead told my mom that I was an engaged, accountable student and that my math skills were solid. But she wanted to see my writing and grammar improve if I were to be removed from a formal classroom environment.

  The bar was set, and I knew I had to reach it.

  I committed the rest of the fifth-grade school year to becoming better at building ideas into sentences and allowing my imagination to show stories on paper. If improving my writing and grammar was what I needed in order to transition to homeschooling and commit myself wholly to skating, then that was what I would do.

  At the end of the year, when I got back one of my last writing assignments, I smiled and breathed a sigh of relief when I read Mrs. Mead’s note on the cover: This is a model paper.

  Fifth grade turned out to be the last year of public school for me. It was scary leaving school: I didn’t want to abandon my friends or the life I knew. But I also really wanted to focus on skating and was willing to make that sacrifice. Plus, now I wouldn’t have to get up as early to skate!

  From then on my daily routine was completely scripted, arranged almost as methodically as my skating programs. The weekly schedule of skating, schoolwork, and supplementary off-ice work (like stretching or ballet) provided the necessary rhythm to keep me going. I’d wake up early because I wanted plenty of time to move around, eat breakfast, and look at my phone before leaving for the rink. Once I got on the ice, the order of the day moved like so: skate a couple of hours, back home for lunch and schoolwork, then back on the ice for another two hours. I finished the training day with whatever supplementary off-ice work was necessary. At night, I made sure my schoolwork was done and in order, and then I got ready to do it all again the next day.

  CHAPTER 7

  WILLING TO WIN

  I DON’T CONSIDER THAT FIRST COMPETITION back when I was six as the start of my journey as a competitor—that wouldn’t happen until a few years later. When I won the 2010 Central Pacific Regional, I was eleven years old, and that’s when I realized I could be competitive and would be competitive. It was thrilling! Winning regionals that October qualified me for my first major national competition, the US Junior Championships, which are held every December. I was competing as a juvenile, the youngest level. Going in, I didn’t have any expectations because I was still polishing and perfecting my techniques, including the tricky double axel. Judges assess skaters’ programs based on the technical elements and the difficulty of those technical elements, plus the quality of the skaters’ overall skill. For actual competitions, judges give programs two scores. The first score grades the technical elements and execution; the second score is based on artistic expression, which is about the sureness and quality of your skating. It’s one thing to complete all the required elements in a program. It’s another to set yourself apart by having flawless innovation and footwork, which can be turns and freestyle moves. Creative, complex footwork makes a good program great.

  Now, when it comes to competitions, every competitive skater must learn to execute six types of jumps, which are divided into two categories: toe jumps and edge jumps.

  At the start of a toe jump, a skater buries her toe pick into the ice and uses that point like a pole vault to lift into the air. Toe jumps include the toe loop, the flip, and the lutz (my favorite). Edge jumps require a skater to use the edge to gain traction and power for takeoff, and they are the Salchow, loop, and axel (which is the most difficult jump of all). The axel is unique because it’s the only jump that begins with a forward approach. With the other jumps, you enter them backward, which actually helps you gain speed for the takeoff. Preparation differs for each jump, but your landing and your in-air position—how you tightly tuck your body for the necessary rotations—are the same for all jumps.

  The double axel is the hardest element required at the juvenile level, and I didn’t have one in my program yet. Still, I qualified for the final round of juvenile nationals. I skated pretty well in both my short and long programs, and I ended up in fourth place. I wasn’t at the top of the podium, and I hadn’t expected to be, because the other girls were older than I was and they had double axels and I didn’t.

  Following my fourth-place finish at nationals, I felt like I should set clear goals for myself, especially since I was moving up to intermediate the next year. I wanted to be able to say I was the champion of something—that was my big goal. And each day I had to make sure I was working toward it.

  Gilley had a goal and purpose for every practice session, which helped me focus on smaller goals on my way to achieving my big championship vision. One of those goals was to clean up and execute that vexing double axel. The key was leaning on the fundamentals I’d learned as a little kid. I practiced however and wherever I could. Jeffrey was such a good sport: we had toys in our shared playroom, but that playroom was also my home practice room, and I had to clear out all the toys and games to make space. Wearing these special indoor shoes, I could practice jumps. My mom would set up the video camera and record me practicing the double axel. After a few jumps, I’d ask her to stop, and we’d rewind and watch. Again and again.

  “How many more turns do I need?”

  “How much more?”

  “How far off am I?”

  My intermediate season kicked off in 2011 and started in nearby Santa Rosa with a showcase skate. I really liked the rink there. It’s a Snoopy-themed rink, and I think Charles Schulz had even been there before. There’s a museum right next to the rink, and Snoopy and his friends are painted all over the Zamboni. Since this was a showcase and not a true competition, it was more of a tune-up, an opportunity to work through nerves and feel the spotlight without the fear and fright of being judged. It wasn’t about technical ability: you could do jumps and spins; you could skate to whatever music you wanted. It was an opportunity to explore your artistic side.

  My short program was ready for the intermediate sea
son, and I couldn’t wait to debut it. I loved performing it because I loved the music: the main theme from “On Golden Pond.” (Sound familiar? This marked the beginning of my love for that song.) When I’m skating to that music, trying to be like a bird, I aim to express myself with my feet, arms, and hands—with every movement of my body.

  Skating like a bird and wearing a sparkly white dress, I won my showcase. I also got recalled that same night! Being recalled means you get the opportunity to skate your program again and are eligible to win a special award. I knew I probably wouldn’t win the overall award, but there was a special award for choreography that I really wanted to win. That award was about a skater’s complete performance persona, how she links and transitions the technical moves, as well as costume, hair, and musical interpretation.

  When they announced the winner of the choreography award, they called out another girl’s name. My stomach sank and my throat ached. I was disappointed. How come she won, and I didn’t? What could I have done better—what could I do better in the future? I could have won. . . .

  I stewed all the way home.

  Later that night, I told my mom, “You know, it’s just an award. I’m going to win nationals, and that’s even better.”

  Looking back, I can’t believe I was so brash and utterly confident that I blurted out a statement like that! As a kid, whatever I saw, whatever I wanted, I just said it and I did it. And that was that.

  CHAPTER 8

  GETTING OUT OF MY OWN WAY

  EVERY COMPETITIVE SKATER—REALLY, EVERY competitive athlete—possesses mental toughness because they work at it. Each day is like a puzzle where you’re trying to figure out how to make those butterflies in your stomach work together to be a help rather than a hindrance. It requires concentration to control the body, mind, and emotions. And the mind—I was learning—was the most important. Anytime we fall, we’ve already fallen in our minds before our bodies even come close to hitting the ice. The best skaters compete against themselves to overcome internal and external forces. Kristi Yamaguchi, for instance, used her shy, quiet exterior to conceal ruthless inner drive and strength.