When she was only 5 years old, a trip to the ice rink in Huntsville, Ala., with her brownie troop introduced Katherine Nix to the sport that would become her lifelong love.
Nix, like many little girls her age, was enraptured
by Peggy Fleming, and wanted to compete in the Olympics from the moment she laced up her skates.
“Every little girl wants to go to the Olympics,” she says. “Very, very few make it that far. You have dreams and build on those dreams.”
Slim as her chances might have been to make it to the international stage, Nix found that she had a knack for the sport. From simple lessons with a variety of coaches, she built her skill level up, skating two or three hours a day, four days a week, learning to glide, learning to jump.
“Your coach helps you to pick your music and work out your routines,” Nix says. “Whatever you’re really good at doing, they’ll put that in your program a lot. They know you, they know what you like, and they know what the judges are going to like.”
Nix progressed to local competitions, then regionals, and eventually nationals. At 15 or 16, she knew there were other athletes who were better than she, but she kept pushing through for the fun of it, still chasing her dream.
Eventually Nix took up ice dancing, which she loved as well, but dance partners were difficult to come by. And then, just as she was reaching her athletic prime, it all stopped.
Nix offers a couple of reasons: she grew up; there were other things she wanted to do; college got in the way.
“[Skating] just kind of didn’t seem as important to me,” she says. “Years later I realized how much I missed it.”
Nix continued on through nursing school, and ended up in the Huntsville ER for four of the first eight years of her career. After that, she moved into the OR, and it’s there that she’s plied her trade ever since—just not in the same place for very long.
“I just got this itch to do something different and go somewhere,” Nix says. “So I and four of the nurses who worked with me started traveling.”
As a traveling nurse, Nix signed a contract to move wherever her services were needed, a decision that took her through 13 U.S. states in the last 12 years. She finally settled at George Washington University, the site of her last travel job.
“I’ve been to hospitals all over the country and seen how hospitals work, met people from all over the country,” Nix says. “When I came here, the people were so welcoming. Even sometimes when you have a really bad day, the people you come in to work with are the nicest people and that makes it easier.”
One day, a co-worker invited Nix along for her daughter’s birthday party, which was held at the local ice rink. As soon as Nix put on skates, she says, “it was like, oh my God, why did I ever leave here?”
Nix immediately hired a coach and started taking lessons as an adult. After 20 years, “It’s kind of like riding a bike, except the jumps weren’t as easy,” she says. She started skating in competitions around the southern U.S., and then in national competitions. Nix reached Lake Placid two or three times; she won in Berkeley. She doesn’t compete presently in ice dance because she doesn’t have a partner, but she’s skating as an adult at a level that she couldn’t have conceived she would reach as a teenager.
“Right now I only do single jumps,” she says. “I’m old and it hurts a lot, and now I have to hold a job, so I can’t afford to break anything.”
Nix liked skating to “Carmen,” but when she was old enough to choose her own music, she chose composer Andrew Lloyd Weber and the book from “Phantom of the Opera.”
“I like to skate to ‘Music of the Night,’” Nix says. “It’s a great piece to skate to. You do your big spins in the crescendos; your jumps in the crescendos. Lutz is probably my favorite jump; it was one of the hardest for me to learn, but once I got it, I loved it.”
Today, Nix skates in Arlington, Va., and she’s training to get back into the adult competitive world. She sport keeps her in shape, and she meets people from all over the world.
“The activity level is so high that it can’t help but be good for you,” she says.
Perhaps just as significant for Nix as getting back into the world of figure skating was being invited to perform in a Christmas show at the municipal rink where she first launched her career.
“Editha Dotson-Bowser, the woman who runs the ice arena in Huntsville, invited me to be in the opening scene of ‘The Nutcracker’,” Nix says.
“She was like, ‘Come on Kathy, you can do it!’ It’s so fun. That’s one of the most fun things you can do.”
For other parents thinking of getting their children into skating, Nix says, there’s nothing bad about the sport.
“It can be expensive, but I would encourage anybody at any age to put on a pair of ice skates,” she says. “It’s just a passion that never got out of my blood. I was never able to leave it alone.”
