by Karen Chen
In 2011, one year into my competitive journey, I experienced firsthand just how strongly the mind can affect the body. And it was a near disaster.
For the second straight season, I won the Central Pacific Regional (this time as an intermediate), and in doing so I qualified for the US Junior Championships, which were being held in Salt Lake City, Utah. This is no longer the case, but back when I was younger, skaters from each region would advance to nationals and then had to qualify to make the final round, where they competed for the national championship.
The intermediate qualifiers were randomly divided into two groups: Group A and Group B. We started with about forty kids between the two groups, and the top ten would make the final based on their performances in their long programs.
I messed up big-time in my long program. I fell, and the whole thing was nerve-racking. I remember sitting in the stands afterward and regretting the whole day. How did this happen? I can’t believe this happened! What if I don’t qualify? Meanwhile Sherri and my mom were together near the ice, watching my competition execute their programs. They were so frantic that Gilley couldn’t handle it and he walked away. His nerves were already frayed, and being around them only made it worse. We were all helpless as we watched the other skaters, who now controlled my fate. Only the top ten girls would advance to compete for the national title. With each performance, my name dropped on the scoreboard. Lower and lower.
Finally, after what felt like an eternity, the last skater was finished. I looked up and found my name. I was in tenth place.
I’d made it. I’d survived.
As soon as we learned I’d made the cut, we went to find another rink in town where I could practice and skate. I was really upset with my disastrous skate, and I was anxious to work those kinks out of my system. Snow had covered the ground, and my parents insisted we take a walk before I got to work.
My mom encouraged me to relax. She encouraged me to draw.
I knelt down and, with my fingertip, started to draw figures into the snow. A bunny, a bird, a mouse. Those finger strokes in the fluffy snow helped me let go and release the bad memories of my earlier performance.
I was relieved to have a second chance, and the next day, before I began my short program, Gilley reassured me, “Act as if you’ve just now started the competition. Be confident.”
Then there was my dad, who sometimes said outrageous things to break the tension and make me laugh. “So what if you fall on your face? You won’t die.”
“Daddy, that’s not funny.”
“Whatever happens, it’s okay,” he continued. “We’ll always be proud of you. No matter what.”
I don’t remember being nervous when I skated out to start my short program—unlike my mother, who was so anxious she hid behind my dad’s back, barely able to turn her eyes toward the rink.
I was in the fourth and final group to skate my short program because my regional qualifying score had been among the highest. To create the birdlike imagery on the ice for “On Golden Pond,” I reached back into my childhood and drew on what I’d learned in Chinese dance classes. Instead of thinking about my nerves or the pressure, I focused on how much fun I was going to have. Some of the most difficult elements of the program came during the final seconds. The tricky one-footed step work and my closing layback spin required that I keep my concentration. My mind couldn’t wander and think about what-ifs or what-happened-alreadys.
Thankfully, I did not fall. In fact, I did very well! And my short program score put me in second place, just 0.01 points out of the lead. By time I took the ice to skate my long program, everyone else had skated. I knew the rankings. I knew exactly what score I needed to claim the title. I knew if I executed my program, which had multiple triple jumps and a challenging three-jump combination, the score should take care of itself.
I was fighting and attacking the program. I skated like I had something to prove. When I uncurled out of my closing spin, I waved, bowed, and scooted off the ice. I wanted to see my scores.
In the kiss and cry area off the ice, where skaters and coaches wait for marks to be revealed, Sherri had one arm around my shoulder and Kleenex in her other hand. When they announced my score, Sherri gasped and then cried. I had won the national title with the highest intermediate-level score ever awarded!
That whole experience was very surreal for me. In Salt Lake City I experienced the lows and the highs associated with competition. And after I won the title, I even signed my very first autograph. I didn’t know what to sign, or how to sign—so I just wrote my name.
CHAPTER 9
MEETING A MENTOR
NOT UNLIKE THE TALES SURROUNDING URBAN legends, my skating friends and I grew up hearing stories about Kristi Yamaguchi and how she sometimes popped into one of the local California rinks without warning. Whether it was in Fremont, San Jose, or Oakland, every now and again she’d walk in unexpectedly and skate for a bit.
Growing up, I was always waiting for that moment when Kristi would miraculously show up at the rink where I was skating. After I won the intermediate title, the people at Sharks Ice wanted to make a banner for me to commemorate my accomplishment. The day they unveiled the banner was the day Kristi Yamaguchi finally came to my rink.
When she walked in, I could barely speak. I just kept looking at her, thinking, OMGGGGGG. It’s Kristi Yamaguchi.
It took every ounce of courage I had to ask Kristi to autograph my skate. I specifically requested that she sign my right skate because I have to land on my right foot, and I thought it would be lucky. Her autograph would give me a little extra boost whenever I needed it.
As a skater, Kristi stood out among her peers. She was competitive and fierce. You don’t win the Olympics and two World Championships any other way! Like me, she is small and compact, but she was quick, powerful, and light on the ice. I admired her ability to do difficult jumps. She skated with a combination of speed and grace, which I deeply respect. She was also artistic and versatile, working with Rudy Galindo to win two national titles as a pair.
I didn’t just see Kristi as a role model on the ice. Off the ice, she’s generous and caring. In 1996, she started her Always Dream Foundation, which is committed to improving early childhood literacy by implementing reading programs in elementary schools throughout California, Arizona, and Hawaii. And not long after she visited my rink, Kristi asked if I would be a demonstrator at a skating camp she was hosting. Obviously I said yes. My family came, too, and we met Kristi’s husband. She went out of her way to be helpful, talking to me about the ups and downs skaters experience during their careers. She also took it a step further, choosing to work with me as a mentor who not only explained challenges and opportunities but also the ways I could tap into my inner strength to pull through any situation.
No matter how old I get, I will always be grateful to Kristi for the way she influenced and guided me.
CHAPTER 10
PREPARING FOR UNCERTAINTY
I CAN BE VERY NITPICKY. AND I CAN ALSO BE VERY superstitious.
I like to put on my left skate, then my right skate, and then retie my right skate. I do it every day, even for practice. It’s a habit. When I’m retying, I’m not making it tighter or looser, necessarily, but as I said, I do land on my right foot, and I like my right skate to be slightly snugger than my left. Just the tiniest difference is enough for me to notice.
Those patterns that develop as part of a routine help relieve some anxiety when it comes to competing and performing. It may have been funny for me as a six-year-old not to know what warming up was, but as I grew more serious, Sherri and Gilley even choreographed my warm-ups. On the ice, there is no time to waste.
“First time, every time,” Gilley says. “Opening pose, hit your spins and spirals. Do your jumps. Come back when you’re done.” A lot of coaches and their skaters chitchat near the boards during warm-ups, but Sherri and Gilley weren’t interested in that. And, as you know, I wasn’t much of a talker anyway. I just wanted to go s
kate. I don’t want any distractions at all when I warm up. I’ve learned through the years that warming up is very important. In order for me to skate well, I have to get ready before I even go out on the ice. I find comfort in my routine.
I had moved up the ranks as a juvenile- and intermediate-level skater, competing at junior nationals, and now that I was a novice, I would be competing at the same US Figure Skating Championships as the junior and senior skaters I looked up to and admired. The championships happen over a couple of weeks, starting with the novice division, followed by the junior, before finally crowning our senior national champions.
When I showed up in San Jose for the 2012 novice nationals, I discovered the value of building in time to prepare. For the national championships, skaters are allotted practice time slots at the show rink beginning a day or two before the competition begins. We were skating at what is now known as the SAP Center, the home rink for the NHL’s San Jose Sharks. Dating back to the early days with Crystal, my programs’ choreography was sketched around those colorful hockey lines. But when I pushed out onto the ice for practice that day in San Jose, the ice was blank. The normal hockey circles—the red and blue lines that marked the ice—weren’t there.
Whoa. What is this? Where am I?
Sherri and Gilley and my mom were right beside the rink as I skated around, having a bit of a panic attack. I didn’t want to say anything to them. It’s fine. It will be fine, I kept telling myself. But my eyes continued cutting back to the boards, looking for their faces, for what was familiar. The only thing I could do was start skating, which helped calm my freak-out. Once I began skating, I got accustomed to the rink. The lines I was used to might not have been there, but I still knew where I was: on the ice. And I would be okay.
Since San Jose was practically in my backyard, just a few minutes south of Fremont, my family and I drove back and forth to the competition each day. My pre-skate routine began as soon as we got in the van: headphones on, music up. I was getting focused and trying not to think too much about myself or what I was about to do. Really, I needed to stay calm and not think about skating just yet. That would come soon enough.
When I’d initially practiced at the arena, I scouted out a secret, private, empty spot inside the complex where I could get into the zone. While Dad and Jeffrey parked, my mom and I quietly and quickly walked to my warm-up cove. I was still listening to my playlist, and then I asked my body to slowly and deliberately start firing. Some stretches at first, followed by light jumping. Then I switched to my competition music; for the short program, I’d decided to skate to “The Chairman’s Waltz” from the Memoirs of a Geisha soundtrack. The movements along the cello strings—languid yet sharp and precise—instantly pushed my mind into competition mode. All at once I could see and feel the music as it flowed in and out through my arms, then through my whole body and my mind. I walked through the entire program, visualizing the complete choreography, jump techniques, and spin positions. Finally, I was ready to put on my skates. Left skate. Right skate. Stand, jump, bend a few times. Then reach down, loosen the right knot, and retie it.
Once it was time to compete, everything happened in a blur. I do know that I fell once during the short program, but my technical elements graded very high and my second mark, which had to do with my program’s artistic merit, was also good. I was the leader after the short program going into the final day of competition, which was the free skate. In terms of my routine, the second (and last) day of competition unfolded pretty much exactly as the first. Only this time, during my warm-up it was cello strikes from Nino Rota’s The Godfather soundtrack cueing my movements.
As I was announced—“On the ice next and representing Peninsula Skating Club in San Jose, California, here is Karen Chen!”—family and friends were there supporting me, and a few people I trained with at the rink in Fremont had even made signs. Go Karen! one read. Princess Karen Chen! read another. Of course, I didn’t read them at the time—only later did I see them on the video my mom had shot.
During those first moments, weaving out and in, trying to feel the ice, I gestured to the audience and the judges as if to introduce myself: Hello, here I am . . . and I’m ready.
Once I reached my starting mark, I listened, waiting for the music. The song started suddenly, with a quick burst of strings, which pushed my right arm down before sweeping it across my body. And then off I went. For the next four minutes, I followed the percussive taps and string chords that provided the perfect markers to signal my switches from left foot to right foot, inside and outside edge, jumps and spins, spirals and splits. It was a lot of hard work! The absolute best, most amazing kind of hard work.
In the kiss and cry area after, I was still breathing heavily when my score was announced.
“Total score,” the voice said, “one hundred forty point one seven.”
I smiled a big smile full of teeth, still trying to take in air, as Sherri leaned down to congratulate me and remind me that it was my highest mark ever. In fact, 140.17 was the highest novice competition score since the new judging system was put into place at the US Championships in 2007!
After claiming the novice title, I got to stick around and skate with our local skating club during the opening ceremonies for the senior national championships. Jeffrey skated with us, too. When the performance was over, the organizers led us upstairs, where we got to pose wearing Team USA jackets. I didn’t get to keep the jacket, but just trying it on gave me a lot of motivation to earn a red, white, and blue jacket of my own one day.
Not long after I won the novice title, I was also awarded a scholarship from Kristi’s Always Dream Foundation. I was so grateful for the assistance the scholarship provided my family to cover training costs. Particularly because, despite my record-setting performance, I had a lot to learn. Later that summer, in 2012, I would turn thirteen—finally a teenager—which meant I’d been skating for almost nine years. That’s a lot of time putting my body through stress, the daily power movements of surging and soaring, and also bending and bracing to absorb the weight every time I landed on the ice and released back into the edges. I had never done much strength training; I basically just skated and stretched. I had strengths and weaknesses and imbalances, and as my body grew and changed, the weaknesses and imbalances started calling out to me and I began to feel pain. I began to struggle. Nothing had ever bothered me like this before.
In 2013 when I moved up to compete as a junior, I continued to have quite a bit of knee pain. Every day I had to wrap ice packs around my leg. I finished second in the Pacific Coast Sectional to qualify once again for the national championships, and throughout the week of nationals in Omaha, Nebraska, the ice bag was a constant training companion. When all the skaters were called together to draw for our skating order, it was right after my practice session and I walked in with ice hugging my leg. Everyone looked at me.
I’m fine. Everything is fine.
Truthfully, though, everything was not fine. I didn’t understand what my body was trying to tell me. I was concerned and confused. My feet had gotten bigger, which meant my blades had, too. My legs looked almost a foot longer, and they had begun to curve with muscle. Skating can be awkward enough without your body sending you mixed messages.
Competitive skaters consciously build their seasons to peak at the right time. That’s why we jam our schedules with travel and competitions at smaller rinks all over the country: we use those opportunities to practice and make sure we’re correctly building to the big moments. And for all of us, one of those big moments is the national championships. Going into 2013 junior nationals in Omaha in January, I wasn’t sure if all the pieces would finally come together. I loved my music and the silky, satiny, shimmery blue dress I was planning to wear for the short program. But that was where the positives ended. My wavering confidence about my changing body affected my jumps, which weren’t as fluid as they used to be.
I ended up in third place after the short program, and then I stumbled o
n my first combination during the long program. Which meant that, in the end, I finished fourth overall.
But if I thought that was the end of big changes in my life, I was wrong.
Gilley had to have a hip operation, and he decided he could no longer travel for competitions. As my performance schedule grew more intense, I needed a coach who could always be there with me on the road. And Gilley and Sherri trained as a pair, which meant I was losing Sherri, too. My family and I had to find a new coach.
Where would I train? Where would I skate?
CHAPTER 11
BREAKING THROUGH
THE TINY STICKER ON THE SLIDING GLASS DOORS leading into Icetown offered a not-so-subtle warning: Enter at your own risk. This rink—buried in the corner of a strip mall, next door to a police station—was not kidding around.
Even though it was only a six-hour drive south from where I was born and raised, Riverside, California, was practically a foreign land to me. In contrast to the glowing clouds and shimmering blue bay of my childhood in Fremont, Southern California’s scorched, dusty brown mountains became the scenery of my teenage years. Summers in Riverside feel like you’re standing in front of an open oven, or like you just turned on a hair dryer and pointed it at your face.
But we didn’t choose Riverside because of the landscape, the weather, or the rink. We chose Riverside because of Tammy Gambill.
I had first met Tammy in 2011, the summer before my intermediate year, when I went to Riverside to train with her for a week. It was like a camp where you learned new things and then went back home and took those new skills with you. Tammy grew up as a skater, but instead of dreaming of podiums, she always wanted to be a coach. She’s been named developmental coach of the year by US Figure Skating multiple times, and I believed she could help me tighten up my jumps and overall techniques. Plus, Tammy had a no-nonsense reputation. I’ve always taken my ice time very seriously, and on Tammy’s rink, she commanded everyone’s focus.