Some find their “zone” in the arts or music. For figure skater Willow Grinnell, the moment she steps on the ice is when she feels she’s most creative. “I like to take a couple of laps around the rink, getting up to that powerful and fast glide before I do my favorite jumps and spins,” she said. “I love the freedom of being able to create my own programs.”

When emotional songs, like Adele’s “Hello” play over the loudspeaker, it takes her out of her everyday thoughts and into the zone.

“The best feeling is when I’m going super fast around the rink and go into a big arabesque spiral,” she said.

Willow first tried ice skating at three years old and began training as a figure skater at seven years old. There are eight levels to becoming a senior figure skater and at 18 years old, so far she’s mastered six.

She passed her juvenile freestyle and intermediate moves, which are patterns or figures on the ice. In the Midcoast, there’s not much available competition figure skating, which suits Willow just fine. She’s never really been interested in competing, just bettering her skills and when she goes to college, she thinks she’ll stop testing altogether and just skate for fun.

On a rainy day in December, she sits in Mr. Kahn’s art room at Camden Hills Regional High School and opens her laptop to show me photos taken of her performances on ice in the last few years. “I’ve been working on this particular move lately; it’s every figure skater’s worst nightmare,” she said. “It’s an axel, the only jump you take off from forward so you jump up, spin from a rotation and a half and land backwards.”

She said she’s fallen so many times, she doesn’t even feel it any more.

“The first thing you learn is to fall left or right and to land so you don’t hurt yourself,” she said. “But one time, I landed so hard on my tailbone I bruised it and it hurt for weeks.”

I asked if that deterred her from getting back on her skates and she smiled. “Nope. Never.”

Other moves she’s mastered include the layback spin, in which she drops her head and shoulders and arches her back downwards toward the ice and spins. It looks like a terrifying, if not nauseating, move. “You get to a point where you just learn not to get dizzy,” she said.

Along with skating, she plays field hockey and a little bit of lacrosse, but sees herself focusing more on school when she goes to college next year. She still hasn’t decided where she wants to go but she wants to study the environment.

"I will always see figure skating as 'my thing',” she said. “When people ask me what I like do, I say I'm a figure skater.”

Willow will be performing as Frozen’s Elsa alongside Santa on Sunday, December 20, at the Midcoast Recreation Center in Rockport. The show begins at 12:30 p.m. with performances by Midcoast skaters.

Kay Stephens can be reached at news@penbaypilot.com