Skate Reanimate

Back in the day I worked in a skateshop. It didn’t pay much, but I got a great discount on equipment, which makes it hard getting back into the sport and having to pay full price for everything!

The good news is that retail price for skateboarding equipment hasn’t changed much at all in the last 15 years. A complete skateboard is still around $120 US, kneepads are still around $30, and good shoes still go for around $50. Even better, I’ve begun to discover that all the equipment and gear is way better than what we had in the early 90s. Boards are light, symmetrical, and beautifully concave. Pads are lighter but seem better-padded than before. And from reading some reviews it sounds like shoes have come light years.

I’ll probably make several posts on gear in the coming weeks, but I’m going to start by listing what I’ve got right now and what I think of it all:

Board

I had bought a new board about 7 years ago hoping to get into skating then, but didn’t really put much wear on it. So my deck, an Alien Workshop Rob Dyrdeck from 2000, is a bit old, but not in bad condition. Alien Workshop was a great up-and-coming brand when I was getting out of skating, and so I had to try it. I like the pop on this board, and it just feels good under my feet.

The deck’s pretty narrow, but I chose that on purpose because I used to freestyle a lot, and am used to a tiny board.

Trucks are equally old (or older) Grind Kings, which I like, except for the squeak.

Wheels. Does this matter? Correct me if I’m wrong, but so long as you have medium-size, medium-hardness wheels there’s not much to say about wheels. I remember springing for the good Swiss bearings, but I didn’t obsess over hardness and size like I did when I was a kid (soft for street and hard for vert, isn’t it?)

Pads

The only pads I own are a pair of older Pro-Tec wrist guards. I never wore pads except for wrist guards and shin guards on street, and only ever wore knee pads and a helmet on ramps. Right now I’m fine with just the wrist guards, but when I venture back into a skate park I’ll need some new kneepads and a helmet, so I’ll be looking for reviews and recommendations.

Shoes

Man, I’m wearing Chuck Taylor All-Stars, just the classic black high-tops. I’ve owned a pair of Chucks perpetually since Middle School, and I still love ‘em, especially for lounging around. What I’m finding, though, is that they’re no good for street skating. So I think the first thing I go shopping for will be some new shoes.

Hey, my name’s Stein and I’m about half-way through my 30th year. I started skateboarding when I was 11, and was considered a “skater” for a number of years. But I abandoned the scene somewhere near my 16th birthday for a number of reasons. I was never any good, but I loved skateboarding and the alt-punk-edge of skating fit my weird-loner-kid personality.

Now I’m going back to skateboarding a total grown-up. I’m still a weird-loner-kid at heart, and I think my reluctance to abandon that aspect of my personality helped bring me back to skating after all these years. But I feel older every day, I don’t have half the time or energy I used to have, and I ache in places I didn’t know existed–without even exerting myself.

So this ‘blog is a record of my experiences. I’ll tell you what its like being over 30 and trying to develop skills in the highly technical and challenging sport of skateboarding. I’ll talk about the good things I find, and the bad crap that inevitably happens in skating.

The idea of keeping these journals occurred to me as I was laying on my tail in a parking strip, completely out of breath and injured after about 20 minutes of really quite tame skating. I wondered how many other older guys go back to skating, and how many of them stick with it. I thought about how tricky it was for me, earlier that day, to shop for and buy new skate shoes (DC? Fallen? whatever happened to Airwalk as the major brand?) And I realized how utterly thrilling it was to finally land a handful of tricks at 30 that I could never get through at 13.

I should note that about 7 years ago I did buy a new skateboard with the same plan, hoping to get back into the sport, and actually doing pretty well for a couple weeks. Then I had a dumb little spill at the skatepark which resulted in a very painful and frustrating elbow fracture. This was a major problem for me as I was days away from moving overseas at the time to take a new job. Well, the combination of events kept me off of skating for the last half-dozen years, but now I’m committed, and determined to last longer this time.

That’s probably the longest entry I’ll be making for a while. I’m going to instead focus on the equipment I’ve got, the equipment I need, the tricks I can do, and the tricks I want to do. I’ll probably inevitably go back to the best and the worst times skating as a kid, and in doing so I’m sure I’ll end up ranting about anything I see as being wrong with skateboarding today.