Plan ice skating sessions.
A 90-minute public session is not 90 minutes of skating, and the gap surprises most families. Resurfacing takes the ice out of use for around 12 minutes each time. Rental fitting before you start is a queue that scales with the group — roughly three minutes per person on top of a fixed wait, so six people is over 25 minutes. Then there is rink-side rest: a first-timer spends more than a third of the session recovering at the barrier, a confident skater around a tenth. Adding these up shows why arriving as the session starts leaves a group of beginners with well under half an hour on the ice.
Arrival time
Arrive = fitting minutes + 15 min for tickets and lockers
Skating time
Skating = (session - resurfacing breaks x 12) x (1 - rest fraction)
Each skater is sized individually, and sizing rental skates properly means trying a pair, finding they are loose, and swapping. Three minutes per person is realistic, and at a busy weekend session the queue itself can be longer than the fitting. Bringing your own skates removes almost all of it.
Yes. Skating uses stabiliser muscles most people never load, and first-timers grip and tense constantly, which is exhausting. A third of the session at the barrier is normal and not a sign of doing badly — it is why a shorter first session often works better than a long one.