Ellyn Kestnbaum’s life seems to revolve around ice skating. She keeps her skates in the trunk of her car.
She purposely moved near a rink so she could train — and then shower — during long lunch breaks.
In graduate school, she wrote her doctoral dissertation on skating.
“I sort of felt that all the stuff I was doing for skating I could justify,” the 48-year-old Bethesda resident said. “I could purchase tickets as research.”
Her passion for skating flowed into her studies in what Kestnbaum called a “sudden explosion.” She was skating at the ice rink near the University of Wisconsin’s graduate school when she began to get interested intellectually in skating. The result was a dissertation that later contributed to Kestnbaum’s book “Culture on Ice: Figure Skating & Cultural Meaning.”
“I was taking classes in representation of gender and I was interested in how that was done in figure skating,” she said, adding that some scholars analyzed skating only by watching it on television. “I was looking at how [these scholars] overtly feminized female athletes when most of those people had never skated.”
Kestnbaum competes as an adult figure skater with the Washington Figure Skating Club. She had been competing in nationals almost every year, until a knee injury sidelined her this winter. The injury, the result of a collision with another skater three years ago, intensified in November when she tried to break in new skates during training.
“It hasn’t been the same since,” she said, noting her three- to four-week training routine has diminished.
“Now I can walk around fine,” she said. “It’s better than it was in November, but I haven’t felt I can get back and do all the new moves I’m going to do.”
Kestnbaum explained that figure skaters must complete a series of tests to advance to a higher competitive level. The first four levels of the adult tests are a combination of the first five levels of the children’s tests. Before the accident, Kestnbaum was working on the third-level adult silver moves and the pre-juvenile moves.
“I sort of joke, I’ve been trying to get to be pre-juvenile since I was 13 and I hope to get there by the time I’m 50,” she said.
But she says she is not disheartened. Competing has been always more about the challenge than the points.
“Why I liked it then and now is because it’s complex and there’s always something new to work on,” she said. “Something I talked about in my book is there’s this tension between the freedom of gliding across the ice and then there’s the challenge of doing different things and the sense of reward when you succeed.”
In the meantime, Kestnbaum continues judging and plans to compete in local competitions, with hopes to return to the adult nationals.
She also wants to return to skating between those long lunch hours at work. Fortunately, her boss is flexible. Kestnbaum is a journal supervisor for the American Journal of Physiology, copy editing and managing workflow.
“I just love the sport from all aspects but I miss being out on the ice,” she said.
