So pretty much this whole post is a good advertisement for skating with protective gear.

Let's see, in the past nine days, I have

-been to 3 rollerparades
-gone ice skating and tried ice slaloms (!)
-tried out speed skates for the first time
-messed around on quad skates at a rollerdisco
-practiced lots of slides
-enjoyed & practiced lots of slalom in several places
-gone to yoga, of course

Oh yes. We hung around a bit in a skatepark as well, but I'm not really counting that because I was too chicken to drop in on the quarter pipe there, because of the fact that it's more concave than anywhere else I've dropped in before, and also, I didn't have any guidance from Vicky Denissen, who taught me how to do it in the first place and has a good eye for when I'm about to do something dangerously wrong, and a knack for reassuring me to go ahead when I'm doing something right.

But anyway. We went to a "roller disco" night last night, which was really fun even though there weren't a lot of people. I played with some quad skates for awhile, and they are really great for dancing, because of the stability they afford, and also the way your foot is applied to the ground. This was maybe the second or third time I've been on quads (not counting any birthday parties at the roller rink I attended as a small child), and I really got a feel for them last night, even though I didn't keep them on too long. It's brilliant (and a novelty) being able to shift your weight to the outside of your skate while keeping your foot flat on the ground, and vice versa. Instead of outside and inside edges, you have outside and inside wheels. Sitting tricks are ten times easier (in a straight line, anyway!) because of the fact that you have a stable little platform to roll on, and dancing moves look and feel very, very cool. Slalom is much more difficult with quad skates, of course, but it is possible, and I could manage some tricks quite well, but only up until the moment that I would forget I was on quads instead of inlines, and then I would screw up fantastically. :)

Also, here is what I've learned about downhill since my last post, which is actually embarrassingly obvious, but I just didn't think of it myself at the time:

As slalomer on a rockered setup, we are only riding on two wheels. Therefore it's much less stable and more difficult to get speed than if we were on a flat setup going downhill. It's also scarier. :) The solution? Duck down low (duh). The scary feeling is gone, you go faster, and your wheels make more contact with the ground. I should have thought of it last week, because I've done this many times during the rollerparades. Anyway, this time was WHEEEEEEEEE! I'm still not as fast as I'd like, but then again, I'm also not really ever satisfied with anything about my skating, so there you go.

However, the rollerparade in Brussel this time didn't hold a candle to the one the week before. We took a path that didn't include the huge hill from the last time, which was disappointing. :(

One of the coolest parts of the night was at the end of the tour when we kept barreling down the entrance ramp into the parking garage, ducking under the arm of the parking gate (I was doing footguns underneath it), and looping further and further down until the very bottom level, leaning left the whole time and feeling the centrifugal force. We kept taking the elevator back up to the top and doing it over again.

Let's see, in other news, I bruised my tailbone at the first Brussels rollerparade I attended, thanks to going for a parallel slide on a tiled floor and getting my blade caught in the tiny gap between two tiles and suddenly BAM! I was down. I'm still sore, but luckily that's not a fall I've experienced ever before and hope not to again. I think surfaces for sliding are just like for slalom...if you're strong at what you are doing, you can manage almost anywhere, but I'm definitely not good enough at sliding to be pulling off parallel slides where the ground is not forgiving. By the way, they do make such a thing as butt padding, and it would have literally saved my ass had I been wearing it at the time.

Within the same ten minutes of that happening, I also had a head-on collision at a good speed (I was gearing up for another slide) with another skater, who was also getting ready to slide. We had been skating in the same direction but maybe six feet apart, which was probably a little too close. Then he turned unexpectedly and we pretty much ran into each other at full speed. It was like playing a game of chicken where nobody chickened out.

In the moment before impact, though, I realized what was about to happen, so I reached out to absorb the energy rather than try to deflect it, which worked pretty well. Neither of us were knocked to the ground, and I only ended up pinging the bone above my right eye on his helmet (Helmets: Great if you are both wearing one. Not if only one of you is.). At the time I worried that my eye would be black the next day, but it never got beyond pink and a bit puffy, which was fine by me, and it didn't really hurt after the fact, unless I pressed on it.

This other skater was actually really cool to skate with (which was why we were running around sliding in the first place), and he was doing something which I would be tempted to call heel-heel cobra (!) as we were skating along with the tour. There was another guy cruising along seemingly endlessly, and REALLY FAST, doing back toe-wheeling (!), and at one point he also busted out an impressive back-flip from practically a stand-still.

So yeah. A lot of the Brussels guys can already slalom pretty well because they are such good skaters, but they don't seem to prefer the cones, which is too bad for slalom! Because they can really SKATE.

Well, that's all I'll say for today, and the title of this post kinda says it all. However, to be fair, much of the skating I've described here is not really slalom-related. I've been wearing wrist guards and sometimes knee pads when practicing slide, although I have to say, they only place I've fallen down hard is on my butt. I did wipe out rather poorly on ice in a hockey slide and bruise my leg, but that was due to the fact that I was still figuring out the mechanics of sliding on ice again, as opposed to on concrete.

I never thought there would come a day that sliding on asphalt would be easier for me than sliding on ice, but hey, look, here we are.

Thanks again for reading and HAPPY SLIDING!
xoxoxo
meg

The Rollerparade / Megan's first downhill

Well I touched on the fact that I went to the Brussels rollerparade last week, but I didn't really say anything about it, and it was a great experience. I think I've been missing out all my life, because when I took up inline skating, I went straight for slalom and didn't really involve myself in these kind of skating tours. There is also the small fact that these sorts of skating tours DO NOT EXIST in the United States, so that's probably also part of it. Well, maybe there is a skate somewhere in the US (Big Apple Roll? Skate Boston? I don't know) that somehow compares, but I've never seen anything like it before. In Belgium, it's all very official, you see, and in the States, if skaters plan on marauding through the city, it's usually just that --a bunch of skaters who meet up and attack the roads together because it's safer than doing it alone or with just a few people. Safety in numbers (and also fun).

Here, there are hundreds of skaters, followed by a throng of cyclists, and the police block traffic at every intersection as we roll on through, and there is a bright pink Evian pickup truck with DJ in the back who looks like he is very much enjoying hanging out in the back of this pickup truck as he is paraded all through the city while he plays music that booms out of big speakers which are set up alongside him in the back of the truck. Along with this, there is a separate Evian truck stocked to the gills with bottles of water, which are doled out at pauses, as well as a Red Bull VW Bug, which also provides free jolts of energy at several points in the tour.

Now, I've been taking part in these tours in Hasselt since I moved here, and it's always a nice skate; usually it's no more than three hours, most of it is flat, and it's very relaxing. We can talk with people while we're skating, we can goof around with wheelings, and it just feels good to be able to stretch out and skate on roads that are usually full of cars. During the pauses, we put down cones and slalom until it's time to go. It's a nice way to spend a Monday night. Also, in Hasselt, the numbers are much smaller than "hundreds," although I couldn't really aim to guess accurately at how many people actually *do* show up. 150, not counting bikes? I'm not sure. Anyway, it's still waaaaaay more people than I've ever seen skating in one place at one time in the USA.

However, when I went to Brussels on Friday, it was a whole different game. There were maybe more than twice as many people as come to Hasselt, plus lots of cyclists. The group left from Palais de Justice at 8:00 pm, and we got back to the same spot at 12:00 midnight. It was fantastic. Unlike in Hasselt, the skate was anything but flat. I was told that the route is never the same twice, but I'm guessing that there are certain bits that get woven into the tour repeatedly, because there was one amazing and looooong downhill section which everyone knew to anticipate. A bunch of longboarders were also there at the top of the hill to take advantage of the road being closed, so they had to know in advance that the tour would go through that spot.

I've never done much downhill, mostly because once I get the feeling that I'm going too fast to be able to stop effectively (and I'm not wearing any protective gear), I get quite nervous. As my skating improves, the upper threshold for how fast I am comfortable going for a long period of time continues to go up. However, I didn't really know what to expect going into the downhill. Naturally I wanted to play the same game as everybody else, so I lined up at the starting line at the top of the hill, ready to run à la speed slalom. Some people counted down, and then suddenly everyone tore away running madly to get speed going into the downhill. However, the running wasn't really necessary, because we picked up speed anyway, and enough of it to get that feeling I get when Tim's driving and I stick my head out the car window and I can't quite catch my breath...it's very exhilarating.

After the initial start, I was going at a good clip and trying to get comfortable with it, but I got going too fast and had to slalom to slow down until I felt comfortable again. After that I let the speed build back up and it wasn't as frightening as it was the first time, and I relaxed into it a little. My bearings were great (I was so happy I had cleaned them the night before!) and my wheels didn't jitter like they used to when I would skate down a big hill very fast, at least not until I was going *too* fast and had to slalom a bit again. There's nothing like bombing down an asphalt hill on your two feet at top speeds to make you think about the fact that you have absolutely nothing protecting you if you fall down or crash into something.

So yeah. Downhill is kind of scary, the same way riding a motorcycle is kind of scary. But it's also fun. :)

On that note, please enjoy this short clip of Greg Mirzoyan bombing down the salt mine in Poland. (!) It's pretty badass. :)


Well I still have stories to tell but they will have to wait til next time.
Thanks for reading and have fun out there! And also, BE SAFE.
xoxoxo
meg