Thin Ice

By Amanda Kasper

In 1996, at 11 years old, Amanda attended an ice-skating birthday party. That event and her subsequent experiences on the ice not only cured her migraines, but also granted her unprecedented self-confidence, and became the key to her soul. In Thin Ice, Amanda shares the ways in which every major lesson she's ever learned, she's learned on the ice - proving that skating was never just a sport or frivolous activity for her. To this day, Amanda still laces up her skates when both time and her health allow for it.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lulu.com
• Release date: May 14, 2014
• ISBN: 9781312190863

Book preview

Thin Ice

Thin Ice

Thin Ice

Reflections from Within

Amanda B. Kasper

© 2013 Amanda Kasper. All rights reserved.

ISBN 978-1-304-78960-0

Table of Contents

Introduction

Snowplow Stop

Tick Tock, Tick Tock

Three Turns & Mowhawks

Toepick

Waltz Jump

That One Time

Click, Click

Your Biggest Competition Is Yourself

Skate Into The Ice, Not Just On Top Of It

Commitment

Double Double, Toil and Trouble

The Day That Changed All The Other Days

Nothing But Love

The Wall

Dance Your Heart Out

Politics

What I Took With Me

The Truest Truth

Preview Night

My Return

Starting Again

An Entirely New Way Of Understanding

Believe In Yourself

Tell Me Why

Dedication

To Mom and Dad and Ari.

To Joan and Lila,

to Matt and Stephanie,

to Jamie and Rob,

to Loni and Suzy,

to Karen,

to Diana,

to Debbie,

to Cal;

to Lars,

to Meagan,

to Evelyn, to Gordo and Wylie and Nancy and Janette;

to Cathy Casey and Tara Lipinski and Rudy Galindo and Scott Hamilton and Ekaterina Gordeeva

To Courtney and Heather and Melissa and Ashley;

to Jackie and Marissa and Laura and Lizzy,

to Tara and Rachel and Liz,

to Vicki and Alex and Heather and Laura and Jorie;

to Carley and Chloe and Deb and Lisa.

To everyone who has touched my life both on and off the ice.

But mostly to Stephanie.

And for Cal.

Skaters make for good fighters.

We are strong, determined, and honestly trained to push harder and push farther than most others.

We learned that mindset at a young age and grew up with it. Just like our coaches said, you have to follow through.

What matters most are the efforts we make.

If we put as much effort into the trials and tribulations throughout our lives as we did into skating, if we could go back and channel that drive that we lived for, we could do anything.

Just rearrange a bit, we all have the ability to find it again.

Whatever it takes.

[danni fillip]

Introduction

The parameters of your life are never black and white; they’re grey. There is no path laid out, no instruction guide, no way to know what’s right and what’s wrong. No way to realize that right and wrong vary from person to person, family to family, circumstance to circumstance. There’s trial and error. There are role models. We find guidance and advice and inspiration from the things that strike our hearts and ignite our souls. Sometimes intentionally sought out, sometimes accidentally found, these are the moments, the milestones, the things that change us from who we might have been to who we instead become.

My story – it’s complicated. But so is everyone else’s. My story wraps and winds through tunnels darker than I’d ever wish to share – but sharing them seems to be the only way to express the places where I’ve found the most good in life. And I think it’s important that people know.

I’ve been through 19 years of rigorous academic training. Elementary school, middle school, high school, college, graduate school. In each classroom, from each professor and each classmate, each lecture and each assignment, I’ve learned things. I’ve learned things about mathematics and economics and statistics, things about language and history and the arts. I attended every Take Your Daughters to Work Day as I transformed from a girl into a young woman. I prepared, by not only the standards of my school district, and not only the standards of my parents and grandparents, but by the standards of myself to become something. To follow the American Dream. To build an empire or fulfill a wildly successful career position earning top-notch salary; enough to be comfortable, to raise a family, to have a typical suburban lifestyle. I learned so many things in those moments – both things that have forever stayed with me, and things that were lost shortly after they were found. But in truth, the most important things I’ve learned in life, I learned on the ice. Every single lesson, down to the way I live and learn and love, I learned as a figure skater.

This is where you’re going to roll your eyes. Sure, there are the blatant ones. The things that seamlessly translate into life lessons. You try this. You fall down. You see how much it hurts. You get up. You decide whether it’s worth doing again. You climb the ranks, trying new moves; one harder than the next, coming home each night with bruises up and down your legs but ambition overflowing in your heart, knowing that tomorrow, tomorrow might be the day that all those falls were worth it, that all those wrong steps led to one right one. Tomorrow might be the day that starts like any other: you wake up at 5am and walk into a freezing cold arena to turn the lights on, you skate laps as your muscles become limber, and then poof – you land the jump you’ve been working on for months or you follow the moves in the field pattern without skipping those two rockers and a chalktaw.

But then there are the other things. The time you were 13 and your coach told you to skate into the ice, not on top of it. Or the time you circled the ice so many times before attempting your first double jump that your coach insisted/begged/yelled the next round it was ‘on your butt, or land it.’ There was the moment where you learned that counting meant 5-6-7-8-1, and the time that you realized with one alteration of your arms, your entire posture could change, shaving off one tenth of a second on your landing time and decreasing the probability you’d end up on your ass. Then there was the time you were 15 and you watched politics take away something that somebody loved, due to a mistake, just a mistake, and you learn.

You learn that these aren’t just children’s lessons.

They’re not just things applied to one sport in one arena in one part of the world. They’re universal. They’re important. Not just for now, for always. You walk away from the sport, from the life and the childhood you knew, and you bury those things in your heart. You know they are there, but you’re not ready to accept them. You haven’t grown enough to understand.

And then one day you’re 26,