Skate Reanimate

When I was a kid I could get away with more spills and less repurcussions. Now a small spill can put an ankle or wrist or elbow out of commission for days. So while I’ve worn a wrist guard for a long time (I’m on the computer for 10hrs a day for work etc), I decided to pick up elbow and knee pads as well. I plan to wear the elbow guard on my bad right elbow whenever I choose to hit the skate parks, but don’t expect I’ll need the knee pads regularly–still, they’re nice to have.

And because I hope my 5-year-old son will want to pick up skating sometime in the future I got a helmet for the good example. I’ll wear it at parks any time he comes with me.

You can see me here on my new Vew-Do Balance Board. My kind parents bought this for me for Christmas. My folks have always been supportive of skating, going back to my offsetting the cost of my first board at age 11, through to letting my brother build a mini half-pipe in their back yard when he was 16. And though my mother was somewhat concerned that I would hurt myself when I announced I was getting back into skating at 31, both mom and dad thought taking it on would do me good.

But I guessed I might lose whatever skating edge I’d been re-sharpening over the summer if I just atrophied over the winter, and so when I heard about the Vew-Do I was intriguiged.

The Vew-Do apparently came out in 1990–right before I quit skating, it seems, and was marketed to both skaters and general sports-playing-jock-types. I think I remember seeing it way back when, but it looked dopey, and of course the price is akin to a complete board, so that, to a 15-year-old, was itself prohibitive. But not so now. The folks were looking to buy me something different for Christmas, and this fit the bill.

So here it is, the Vew-Do SK8 model in all it’s indoor fun-ness. As you can see from the photos, the board is just like a normal skate deck except instead of trucks/wheels it’s got a heavy-duty plastic beam on the bottom that fits into a groove on the “rock”–a large, wooden mono-wheel support. One balances one’s self by centering one’s weight above the “rock”, and then shifting weight from foot to foot to change the position of the board.

It’s both more challenging and enlivening than I thought it would be, and I find myself hopping on it two or three times a day just to give it another go. Each time I do I find that my balance is a little more sure, and the experience of riding the Vew-Do is yet more enjoyable.

Next up: tricks on the Vew-Do. Apparently one can do ollies, kickflips, shuvits, and more. Best thing about it is now I can rationalize making a post here during the winter months (one that’s not along the lines of, “It sucks that I can’t skate.”)

My new deck finally arrived yesterday (I swear UPS is slower than USPS) and I laid on the grippy, changed out my bearings, replaced my trucks’ kingpins, and put it all together.

Before

After

I took it out skating last night, and was immediately impressed by how high this thing pops. It’s like spaceman ollies!

The concave feels very deep, which I’m not quite used to. In fact, I fell a couple of times because my feet were so “glued” in place by it.

As advertised, it does seem to flip faster, and though I’m still having a hard time with kickflips in general, heelflips seem to be easier to initiate (though harder to control, as the board flips at least another half-flip from the same amount of effort).

I’d been having problem with my right ankle while skating. I kept spraining it in–usually pretty minor injuries, but the fact that I kept using it and kept doing it didn’t help.

So one of my co-workers, who does a lot of martial arts, suggested I get a little ankle brace.

I picked one up at Target for $12, and it fits like a glove. It does make my shoe fit a little tighter, but what’s most important is that it has significantly reduced my ankle strain.

I highly recommend ankle braces for your pushing foot to all skaters over 30.

Back in the heyday of freestyle most skaters wore shin guards, as jumping about while a rapidly flipping board is spinning a foot above the ground beneath you is a recipe for some bruises and scrapes. I too wore shin guards for long practice sessions, simply because it helped me avoid pain and let me keep on practicing after a few failed tricks. I stopped wearing shin guards when I decided I didn’t need them, and I came back into skating this week assuming that they were unnecessary. I am starting to change my mind.

I’ve been skating each night for the last week for about 45 minutes each session, and though I’ve smacked my shins a few times on several occasions its only been the last couple of nights that I’ve really begun to suffer.

Last night I was practicing shoveits and trying to figure out kick-flips again. That should be enough to tell you that I went home with some bruises. (Though at least I have 180 shoveits and pop-shoveits OK, and believe that 360s are not too far away).

This afternoon I spent half an hour at the local public skate park just watching the kids tear it up. I’m planning on trying the park soon myself, but I refuse to let myself go until I have all my basics back under control. From watching the kids today I recognized that I would really want to take advantage of slides and grinds at the park–in fact thats all the most of the kids were trying today.

So tonight I went back to my favorite parking lots and in addition to working on kick-flips some more (…I don’t remember this trick being so hard…) I spent some time on some 8″ painted curbs. Didn’t take me long to feel out backside 50-50s and tailslides, though I by no means mastered them on the backside at least I was doing alright, though when I switched to frontside I failed miserably. After exasperating myself trying to get these down, I finally just went back to backside to end the evening. Well I was getting some nice smacks and short slides on tailslides and was having fun when all of a sudden, bam–I ollie too high and smack the tail down really hard to compensate and not miss the curb. But my front foots already too high itself, and the board strikes the curb, pops back up (and somehow towards my body), thrashing a lovely scrape all the way up my right shin. Curses. Time to lay on the grass and look at the clouds.

5 minutes later I’m thinking shin guards, at least for the time being, might be a good idea again. The pain had brought me to the grass, sure, but I’m pretty tolerant of pain and its typical for me to get back on the horse as fast as I can (if only to get my mind off the pain at hand).

But I also learned something in martial arts some years back that I’ve found to be true: even if you can take the pain, your body can become unconsciously wired to fear repetition of that pain, so much so that your body might resist your will when told to do something that might risk another instance of the same pain. When practicing and trying new stuff, its always better to go in padded and keep your body open to the new moves it needs to learn, rather than to fight the pain over and over and risk letting your body dictate what it will and won’t do.