Skate Reanimate

I took advantage of the warm weather to skate the Sandy Lone Peak skatepark on my lunch break again. I rode a little more aggressively today, still spending some time on manual carving on the round ditches, and feeling out the coping on the 5/6′ end of the park.

Saw a young guy skating 8, too. Pretty crazy stuff.

I broke my skate-fast for the sake of the warm weather and rode the Sandy Lone Peak skate park on my lunch break. I’m nursing a strained ankle, so I just cruised around, resisting the coping, and trying to learn to manual up and down the shallow round walls and banks. It’s not a cool move, but it feels good for some reason.

I traveled to the Bay Area this week for business, and had the chance to skate both the Pacifica skate park and the San Jose Lake Cunningham park. The locals were busy at Pacifica as usual, and I still love the mellow vibe and smooth transitions of that park. Lake Cunningham was hopping, but I was able to find relative solitude in the giant skull bowl as well as the full pipe, and, surprisingly, the 5′ bowl on the East side.

I really dug this 5′ bowl. It’s just my size for mini-ramp style tricks, and has enough of the bowl feel to keep it interesting. The worst traffic here was the occasional biker crossing through on a larger run.

I stopped by the relatively new We Are One skate park, located indoors in Sandy, Utah, just 10 minutes from my new office.

I found this place to be kind of weird for skating. There’s surely more potential that I recognized in a quick, 40 minute session, but I just wasn’t feeling fully stoked. Part of that is surely because it’s beyond my skills, but I think it was built by rollerbladers for rollerbladers, with skaters as an afterthought.

It’s a mix of tall banks and short transitions. The trannys are good throughout, though they used the fattest coping they could find, and really let it pop out of the edge, making it quite a challenge to get on and stay on. But it’s probably no different from pool coping, except that it grinds faster!

They’ve use a kind of plywood for the surface, which is not as slick as masonite but certainly slick enough to cause a few burns on your first few runs. I took a couple of freaky spills, mostly because I lost it on landings, and so next time I’ll be sure to pad up. I rode my tiny-wheeled street board here, which was probably a mistake, for even though the wheels are soft, their size means that I don’t have a lot of control on intentional or accidental slides.

All in all it’s a decent place to come in from the cold. And with snow on the way you can be sure I’ll be back.

Oh, and one of the staff told me they were planning a mini ramp in the store area, which would rock hard. They’re spec’ing it to just 4′, which I objected to, but any mini ramp is better than none at all.

I stopped by SoJo on my way home today and made a number of runs in the bowl, working on little bs smith grinds on the shallow and and bs slash grinds on the deep. There were several other kids skating the bowl tonight, riding pretty hard and fast, so that motivated me to keep trying for more speed and control.

I spent way too much time trying to get rock to fakies on the shallow, but kept hanging up on the pool coping or else pulling back too far and not coming down in time. I ended up rolling my ankle as it got caught under the board. Lots of pain, but an ice bath and epson salt bath later and I’m feeling much better.

I spent about 40 minutes at the Springville park for the first time in weeks. It was fairly abandoned, and I was able to work on the mini ramp and the whole park run. Nothing new, but I did feel much better about rocks after some failings yesterday.

I had a chance to hit the Verdugo skate park in Glendale CA today after a full day of demos for work.

The Verdugo park is pretty small, but it’s extremely well designed. There’s a basic street set up that leads into a very interesting snake run. On either side is a bowl–a kidney pool (6′/11′) with vert tile all around and beautiful pool coping, and a clover bowl, probably the same dimensions, with lots of square corners.

I skated most of the carving lines, worked on carving the tile in the shallow of the kidney (and even kissing the lip on the bs), and developing some fast lines on the big clover without losing control.

I met Paul, a 48yo brother in arms, who was basically hitting the same runs as me, though he had far more lines and far more height on any of the walls. Paul said he plans to skate till he’s 65, which is reassuring to me. If I’m skating like Paul for the next 10 years, that’s a very, very good thing.

I left work on time, had no traffic between 215 and the 106, so I stopped off at the SoJo park for a very quick session, wherein I worked on gaining speed at each dip and corner, and finally tapping the pool coping if only on the bs.

I had a few extra minutes on my way through Salt Lake, so I stopped at Fairmont for a super-quick session, just to get my mind off of work. I stuck to the pool (most of the rest of the park was wet), and aimed high and fast, which helped me finally get back into the coping of the shallows.

Feels like I’m starting from the bottom of the hill again, but that’s what happens when you break the skating habit at my age, I guess.

On the way out of work tonight I decided to dodge the crowded I15 and take 2000 E south, where I just so happened upon the Sandy skatepark. Honestly, I didn’t know I’d be going past it!

Despite the cold I managed a handful of good runs with sketcy grinds, rocks, etc. I did earn my way into manuals on the low box, and a few solid 180 bonelesses on the curved lip. Lots of bikes there tonight, but few newbs on scooters, so all in all it was a good session, and I worked up a sweat for the first time in probably a week.