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

Battle Warsaw / Slides!

First of all, Tim and I will be scheduling Skatefreestyle workshops for the autumn and winter. Summer is just too busy with travel and competitions for us to be giving any in the next few months.

Second of all, we've been up to a lot in the past few weeks, including Battle Warsaw last weekend, which was very different this year than it was last year. The technical level has grown astronomically, which was amazing to see. For me it was very revealing about just how lazy I actually am with training in comparison, as I tend to practice one trick only for as long as it is entertaining, and then I move on to something else. You can see that the Polish skaters train very specifically and very effectively, until a trick is of water-tight consistency. I have taken their example to heart this week and spent the majority of my time working on tightening up tricks and beginning with a few new ones. It's satisfying in its own right, especially with a good drum and bass mix in my headphones, which easily provides a one to two hour backdrop while I plug away at wheelings or sitting tricks or whatever.

However, many of the skaters at the battle appeared to ONLY train tricks, with no nice freestyle mixed in. Without the freestyle, only half the job is done, in my personal opinion. This was reflected in the judging, as I made it through to the final ahead of people who are technically further along than I am, and I assume this is because I was one of the few female skaters representing "freestyle slalom" as a whole, as opposed to "slalom tricks." I was very proud to make it to the final; it was actually the goal I had going into the battle, and once I got there, I didn't really fight. I came in fourth place. *Maybe* if I had fought I could have secured third, but I'm not really sure who I could have beat in that final, because the level was VERY hard.

I was a bit nervous skating in this battle, as opposed to other recent battles, so that was a little disappointing, because I couldn't really pull off any back wheelings, and my sevens were still failing left and right, whereas I am knocking out 7-9 of them easily in practice. Before Paris, I hadn't trained seven in a month of Mondays and just kind of took it for granted that I could do them, and it's been showing in battles lately. So, I've been back to the grindstone and they've improved massively in the past few weeks. However, they still didn't work in Warsaw. This is possibly the most frustrating thing, that I KNOW I can do a trick really well and then I fail it because I am a bit shaky. It just goes to show how sure of your tricks you must be in order to do them well in competition. With back wheeling, I am inconsistent in practices as well as in public. However, I've been drilling the crap out them all week, so maybe I will show some improvements in the next battle. Currently I am shooting for the elusive 20 cone back toe wheeling, and while I've come as close as 19, I've never gotten down the whole line without a single tap or mistake.

Anyway, back to Warsaw, the atmosphere at the battle was quite competitive and serious, and I didn't get much of a sense of the camaraderie amongst the skaters that I so depend on in order to keep bringing me back to battles. However, I realize that a lot of peoples' motivations are different than mine, and that for some people, winning is the only way to have fun. No matter. To each his own. However, it does concern me if this attitude becomes prevalent, and then people shy away from competing. On the one hand it is not necessarily a bad thing, because then it opens up the sport to having several different levels of competition and different kinds of events, but on the other hand, it does not help the sport if the competitions themselves have smaller and smaller numbers of people entering to compete. This is absolutely not the case so far; in fact, there are more people than ever in the freestyle slalom rankings, so I guess it's just a natural part of the evolution of the sport as it gets more popular and the level improves.

Personally, I am still improving all the time and know I am nowhere near the top of my potential, so I will continue to compete as long as I feel like I should be doing so, because I WANT to be as good as the people who are the best, and I know I can be, but it just takes more practice and more experience...i.e. competitions.  

The women's slide competition in Warsaw was my favorite part of the whole weekend. I hadn't signed up to take part originally, because I hadn't practiced any slides in ages. I had sort of lost interest in sliding somewhere between last summer and this one, partially because of the fact that I didn't really know how to improve, and I tire easily of something when I know there is no improvement. I suppose I could have sought out internet videos and studied them to learn, or bugged people to show me things, but I didn't, probably because I've been enjoying slalom way too much and I am content most of the time to just keep skating around the cones. Anyway, Ukranian skater Ksenija Komarchuk had an infectious enthusiasm about the whole thing and basically said to me, "Come on, why aren't you sliding?" which of course, worked on me and I signed up! Lidia Wardzinska was also taking part, and it's basically because of those two that I didn't want to be left out. :)

Ksenija took me on as her sliding paduwan and showed me heaps of tips and tricks, AND Mistrial slide, which I had never done before. I learned so much from her that when I left the competition area on Saturday evening, I left with an altogether different outlook on slides in addition to already being improved from the morning. Not only that, I managed to take fourth place in the women's slide competition, which was held apart from the men's only due to late registrations like mine (sorry, organizers!). Last but not least, I managed to do the whole thing in short shorts, and all of my skin remained intact, a fact of which I am very proud. :)

This week I practiced slide a bit on my own and with Pierre Alix, and I can feel how it's different than it used to be. Different better, if still rather noobish.

Well, apart from Battle Warsaw, there's actually been a lot going on, skating-wise, in that I've been training quite diligently. Last night I also had the pleasure of taking part in the Brussels Rollerparade for the first time, and I am hooked. I will be joining as often as possible until the season is over, that's for sure.

To close off, please enjoy some of these EXCELLENT slide tutorials, which come, fittingly enough, from Ukraine. :)

First up: Mistrial slide


Parallel slide


Pornstar slide


There's lots of these tutorials so check them out and happy sliding!
xoxoxo
meg