More Showcase Ranting

Sorry, no uplifting quotes today. I’m actually still angry about Sunday. I need to have a serious conversation today about it so I’m using this to just get some thoughts together.

For the record, I’m 63 years old with arthritis in both knees and I carry too much weight on my frame. So I’m not in the best shape in the world. So what genius looked at that heat sheet and decided that it would be perfectly fine for me to do that many dances in a short period of time with no real rest breaks. I mean sitting out one or two dances isn’t sufficient recovery time.

I know ballroom is physical. I get that. I don’t have a problem with that. I do have a problem with the situation being set up with periods of intense activity followed by long stretches of nothing. I have a problem with being so exhausted by the end that I really couldn’t focus on any of the technique things we’d been working on. It was just trying to get through each dance and hoping to do the pattern and stay on time.

I use these events as a gauge. I’ll look at the feedback and see what the comments are. You know you’ve progressed when you start to see different things pop up. I have no idea what this batch is going to show or how I’m going to use them in any meaningful way. If I get comments on frame for example, does that mean we have to go back and work on it some more or was the comment just because I was in the middle of the smooth marathon and just got a little tired. I don’t know.

I’ve got a coaching lesson lined up today and I have no idea what we should be working on. Again, I would normally use Showcase feedback as a way to direct what is most important. Here, I’m not sure I can trust it. I don’t have a good sense of what dances went well and which ones didn’t. There were mistakes throughout and the frequency started to increase the more dances I did. I’m fairly sure my technique went to hell late in the rhythm round so I’m expecting to see a lot of not so great feedback. If that was a real reflection of my dancing, that would be fine but I can’t be sure how much of is related to just trying to keep moving.

Normally, I come out of a Showcase excited for the future. As much as I’m mine own worst critic, I usually feel good about what I put on the floor. Now I’m just angry and unsure. I spent a lot of time (and money ) on lessons this year working towards this Showcase as a way of checking progress and making sure that things are moving in the right direction. But this one just felt like a giant step backwards and I’m not sure what to make of it or how we move forward.

I do know one thing for sure which is I can’t sign up for that many heats in the future. I’m not even sure I would believe them if they said they would try to space them out a little better next time. I do like doing multiple heats because it gives you a couple of “freebies” where you can mess up and still recover. Plus, doing more gives the judges more time to see you and maybe offer better critiques. But I can’t do it if they are seriously clustered together. So things will need to be dialed back in the future and I’m going to make that clear today.

Anyway, that’s all I’ve got. I’m just trying to get my thoughts together to make sure I can present my points coherently. Words often fail me so maybe this will help.