Skateboarding is hard, but when it's good, it can be beautiful. Adam Murray (http://anonymousco.tumblr.com/) with an ollie down a drop at The Wastelands.
Hello, reader. Thanks for joining me again. I'll start with an anecdote:
Earlier this spring, my wife Michele and I went to a dinner gathering with some friends. One of our friends said to me, "So, Chris, I heard you went skateboarding today. You know, I don't think I've ever seen a skater land a trick." His comment was one of the funniest and truest statements I have ever heard about skateboarding.
I think the following are a few primary reasons for the general inconsistency of execution my friend observed in skateboarding:
1. Skateboards do not have foot binders.
2. Peer pressure pushes skaters to continually attempt tricks far outside their range of ability.
3. Because of reason (2), the basics are bypassed, board control suffers, falling becomes a habit, success becomes the exception, rather than the rule, and a vicious cycle of failure develops.
Flat-ground flip tricks are among the most common moves to be unsuccessfully attempted. Nathan Pieper with a kickflip at The Wastelands, and of course I can't remember if he landed this one :)
As I learn to skate, I want to become consistent with each new trick, and I will explain the larger reasons for that later. I loosely define consistency as being able to land a trick no less than nine out of ten times. As far as my bag of tricks goes, the first one I have packed up is the ollie. The ollie is the most basic but also most important trick, as it is the move that makes the board stick to the feet in the air without binders.
Learning the ollie can be terribly frustrating. At least it was for me. I became aware of the components of the proper ollie sometime around the age of ten, and it took me an entire summer to execute one. As I mentioned in my first blog post, I have had many short skate phases and that summer was one of them.
For those ignorant of the way an ollie works, the process is as follows: the back foot is positioned over the tail of the board while the front foot is positioned somewhere over or behind the hardware closest to the nose of the board; the back foot presses the tail downward while the front foot lifts and slides up the griptape towards the nose; when the tail hits the pavement, the back foot snaps back upward like a martial artist's hand after breaking an object with a karate chop; the simultaneous pop of the tail and slide of the front foot upward and forward cause the board to seemingly levitate with the skater.
Me in the middle of a stationary ollie 90 to roll away on one of the occasions when the board stuck with me. Photo by Brent Easter.
Now I would like to explain my larger reasons for wanting to develop consistency.
First, I would rather not be another casualty of the vicious cycle of constant failure, so I am starting slowly with lots of ollies and basic variations of ollies. The reason I want to take this relatively slow route to progression is that I believe skateboarding is supposed to be fun, and I have more fun skating when I am rolling away from tricks and maintaining my flow.
Second, related to maintaining flow, my overall conceptual goal in skating is to be able to consistently link diverse tricks together in a line. Line is a common term used in board sports to describe the path one takes and the tricks performed from the point where movement begins to where it ends.
I can think of nothing more inspiring to watch or more satisfying to accomplish than an artfully-choreographed, technically-difficult, well-executed line. In the same way, I can think of nothing more challenging.
Yes, reader, skateboarding is hard. But isn't everything that leads to satisfaction?
