By Niki Cervantes
Staff Writer

January 7, 2015 -- Think of Santa Monica and fun-in-the-sun activities like swimming, surfing or rollerblading probably come to mind. But competitive ice skating?

Living in a sunny seaside community while spending almost all of her free time training in ice rinks is life for Gia Kokotakis, who is 12, lives in Santa Monica with her family and already has a few ice skating championship titles under her belt.

These days, she is preparing for a huge skating competition – the 2015 United States Figure Skating Championships in the Intermediate Ladies Event in Greensboro, North Carolina, January 17 through January 22.

“I’m going to go out and do my best,” she said. “That’s what I always do. I’ve trained and I’m ready.”

Kokotakis placed 3rd in the 2015 Southwest Pacific Regional Championships in Ontario, California in October. She also won the bronze medal at the Pacific Coast Sectional Championships in Spokane, Washington in November. That win qualified her for the National Championships.

She trains at both Paramount Iceland and Toyota Sports Center in El Segundo.  She is coached by Alex Chang, Jere Michael, Frank Carroll and Natalie Shaby, her mother, Rainer Kokotakis, said.

It’s quite a juggling act, being a 7th grader at Windward School in Mar Vista with visions of a future that includes the Olympics.

Thus, she is training about 23 hours a week, plus extra time for strength and flexibility training, as well as some ballet.  Her routine: Up at 4:20 a.m. and on the ice by 5:20 a.m. She starts school at about 8 a.m., does all that, then is back on the ice by around 2 p.m., where she trains until 4 p.m. or sometimes 4:30 p.m. She heads home and is in bed by 6:30 p.m.

“I need ten hours of sleep,” she says.

“I get tired,” she admitted one late Tuesday afternoon, in the car with her mother as they headed home after a day of training. Her mother’s schedule is as early as her daughter’s. (One bonus is that one of the training complexes has a gym, so mom gets in a workout while her daughter skates.)

Also, sometimes, during competitions, she gets the jitters. But all of it – the fatigue, the nervousness – slip away when she’s about to perform, she says.
For Gia Kokotakis, everything else, like the audience, melts away, and she remembers why she does what she does.
 
The instant she hits the ice, it all narrows down to something pretty simple -- “the ice, my skates and the judges,” she said.  Nothing else matters then, she adds.

Kokatakis has been skating for eight years now. She remembers the first time she wanted to skate: She was a three year old, watching a Holiday winter wonderland-type of skating performance at the Toyota Sports Center in El Segundo with a little friend.

“I’d never heard of skating,” recalled Kokotakis. “I saw it with my friend. I thought it would be cool, maybe we could do it together.”

 By the time she was five, she already had big plans, she and her mother both say.
The evidence: Her father was taking video of her while she was skating. During the footage, she proudly announced that her father was showing her as she was “training for the Olympics,” her mother said.

“This is something she always wanted to do,” she said. “It’s a really crazy life, but it’s something she decided to do.”