Personal Training - 6 days, end of daylight, dynamic shots

I haven't gone for six days without a skate since sometime last winter.  That's a long time.  For a combination of reasons (ie. game/skate fatigue from last weekend, slight 'tear' (?) in a rear left hip region muscle, time and energy), I didn't push my return to the skates, even extended by an extra day after I felt fit and fine and up to it.  But by yesterday afternoon I knew that there'd be no excuse for failing to go out in the evening.  Being the last day of daylight savings time I certainly didn't want to waste the final opportunity to take advantage of the time zone.  In past years of spent the eve sighting on the balcony watching the sun set.  This time, watched it go down as I skated up the home hill after a fifty minute session.

It was hard yards, just getting to the schoolyard was tiring.  And then it was hard to keep pushing along with a basic shooting drill (a set of 25 each for four varieties of shot from 15', series of 50 from 30'), let alone the skating equivalent of a trudge up the hill as the sun set.  Goodbye daylight skating and after work workouts for a few months!

Today being Sunday, I took advantage of fine weather and went down in the late morning for a longer session (was gone for over ninety minutes).  I did the usual 4 sets of 25 shots at 15', but then mixed it up with a hundred dynamic shots after pick up in the Offensive zone and release while moving from the 15' circle.  Just to add a bit of pizzaz to it, I counted rebound goals also (being one where I get the rebound while the puck is still moving and within the 15' circle after carooming off either the goal or the concrete 'backboard' gutter edging), and kept the stat for getting a rebound goal off a goal rebound.  Good fun, quite a bit of variety in what I could do with puckhandling and suchlike, and reasonable enough results.  Also, the realisation that getting the rebounds almost doubles the goal haul.  There's a lesson in that!

Quiet Eye training was mainly, in the dynamic shooting, watch the puck onto the stick and then watch the goal for the final glide to the shooting circle, and on the way home, pick spots to focus on on the road ahead - changing up to the next arbitrary spot rather than scanning the road surface directly.  All good.

Then I had half an hour before departing to pick up three grandkids for our traditional Sunday Skate at the Ice Arena!

Shooting Stats for the weekend were:

Saturday: 4 3 5 3 (FH sp, FH, FF Sp, BH @ x25 @ 30')
                (50 x FH at 30') 6
Sunday:   6 8 6 0 (FH sp, FH, FF Sp, BH @ x 25 @ 30')
                (100 dynamic at 15') 18-16-2 (sp, rb,sp+rb)