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Got the skates, baked them, new laces. 100/50 FBV, feel like I have been wearing them for 10 years. It is such a shame this skate no longer exists. Incredible comfort, Really cool to jump into a new pair, all that original life back in the boot, I can feel additional support and energy from the boot.

Since you wrote the above I have had weekly lessons with a figure skating coach and I now have good edge control. Regarding your first statement, I get a lot of feedback from my skates, I can feel the edges very clearly, and for example I know if my forwards/backwards crossovers are wrong because the edges feel wrong. I adjust my technique until the edges feel right. Similarly, if I’m doing a forwards power pull, it’s all about the edge, to minimise the friction and ride the edge. People at public skating tell me that my ankles move about a lot in the skates, I’ve had people ask if my skates are special because of this. I wear Bauer 2S Pro custom skates, and they don’t restrict my ankles at all despite having a stiff shell. Years of basic drills have corrected my (bad) posture, and improved the basic stride and technique, to gain good edge control. After three years of teaching myself, my skating was awful, bad posture, bad technique. I doubt it would have improved much after another three years, I would probably have continued fighting against awful technique and made small gains, limited by the fact that the basics were dreadful. I practiced regularly but all that did was reinforce bad practices. I don’t know if skating with laces undone would have helped someone so utterly inept as me. As an aside, I’ve met quite a few adults who from the first session were learning phenomenally fast eg doing crossovers and spread eagle (mohawk) on the second session. They learnt at least ten times faster than most of us. In every single case the person was an athlete: a professional dancer, a tennis coach, a skier, a boxer, a black belt in a martial art etc. My belief is that thanks to regular exercise they have strength and flexibility, and thanks to years of training in their chosen discipline they have learnt how to control their body, and they have learnt how to learn new tricks. I assume that is a stage we all pass through when first learning to do a physical discipline.

I am back at it as of this past Monday. Thanks for your well wishes.

Posted on Phew and 2k but figured I'd post here as well. Just had these done by Joe at Hockey Menders and very happy.

I've never tried the quad. I went with the ellipse bc it made sense in my head to have one long continuous elliptical radius, with out the transitions zones of the 4 radius on a quad. I'm on the border line between quad 2 and quad 1 , depending on who i asked. It seems that quad 2 was recommended for my 288 size runners, but for the ellipse profiles, it was ellipse 1. I was glad to see the ellipse 1 was recommended for the 288 as i didnt wanted a longer profile ( kind of like what you had mentioned about moving down one profile size ). I'm 44 and a decent skater and this is my first time trying a profiled blade. I will never go back and have never felt more stable on my skates. I love the profile, however i did keep catching my toe ever so slightly in that first month or so of skating when carrying the puck and doing crossovers. I've since gotten used to it and have no issues now over the last 10+ months. The only thing i feel like i may want is just a slight pitch forward to get on my toes a little more for acceleration ( which is why i started this thread about pitch on the new line of ccm skates ). Other than that, they are great.

I tend to stay away from injected eyelets. When players request the Hyperlite skates I recommend they order custom and get standard eyelets unless they are entirely sold on the injected eyelets.