Travis Tries Writing: July 2013

I've recently picked up the blades again and started carving up the local skate park.
...
That sounds a little serial-killerish.
Let me back up a bit.

Back in Newcastle, I loved rollerblading.
It took me a long to pick them up. It started when my middle brother bought (was gifted? memory is hazy...) a pair of rollerblades back in the mid-late 90s. This was at the time when rollerskating and blading was probably at its peak in the basic recreational population. These blades were a simple affair from a company called Aerial. Black body with red inside trim and solid plastic (?PVC) wheels. Standard 4x1 setup. Noisy buggers, and definitely not good on slick/slightly damp surfaces, but otherwise pretty serviceable. Took him a little while to get used to them, but within a few hours, he was starting to roll around our driveway and garage with confidence. My youngest brother eventually got a pair too (basically, the same style, just a size or two smaller).
I, on the other hand, didn't want anything to do with them. They were loud, seemed hard to control especially when trying to slow down and generally looked like an accident waiting to happen, especially with the grate to the drain where the garage turned in to the driveway being roughly one millimetres wider than the wheels. I would stick to my bike, thank you very much.
Every now and then, we would head out to Speers Point pedestrian track and do the lap from Speers Point park to Eleebana and back a few times.
For some unfathomable reason, Dad got Mum a pair of rollerblades for her birthday. I don't know why. He runs out of ideas quickly. A pair of black Aerials but, instead of the PVC wheels, these had smoother see-through Polyurethane wheels. Much quieter and possibly a bit better at turning, though significantly worse in damp/slippery conditions. So, in an amusing few months, she learned to blade... albeit gently.
After a while, in the times that she wasn't using them (read: most of the times), I picked them up and gradually learnt to skate. After the initial awkwardness of learning that your feet are not meant to be able to stay still while you move, it actually felt kind of smooth. It must also be noted that, at this time, the extensions to our garage had been finished and we had a few mattresses at the far end of the garage. It must also be noted that our driveway, from the street end, runs down to our garage for maybe 7 metres at a 35-45 degree angle. As you can expect, when the cars were out, we basically spent a full summer rolling up the hill and then down again as fast as we could and fly into the mattresses in many different ways. Good times.
That Christmas, I think I was maybe 12 at the time, Mum decided to get Dad back by buying him a pair of blades. He had to know that was coming. These were a set of grey Bladerunners. Really quite smooth to ride on and quite possibly the best blades I've had the pleasure of using. For good measure, I also received a pair of blades. Black Aerials. Felt quite chunky/bulky and, to be honest, I didn't really like them that much as they felt too tall (I think that they were 80+mm wheels instead of the standard 76 or 78mm of the time), heavy and a little more slippery. Also had a very unusual clip system that, to this day, I still can't figure out. But they did the job for a time.
Eventually, Mum and Dad called a truce to their amusing attempts to blade (oh, they tried and actually became competent at it... while at the same time hating it) and agreed to never do that again. So I sort of inherited Dads Blades (by inherited, I mean claimed them as my own and vehemently defended this claim when others tried to use them when I wanted to blade). The middle brother stepped up into a new set (?my old set) and the younger brother had grown in to the middle brother's. One of our neighbours also got some blades and we devised a new game: Blade Ball.
The rules were reasonably straight forward: In the middle of the rollerblade-friendly (i.e. not grass) area of our backyard, there was the basketball ring that hung off the verandah. In order to have the ball in your "side" of the court, you had to either get to a Safe Zone. One Safe Zone was near our neighbours fence, the other near the strawberry garden/clothesline. Once in your "half" you and your team mate had to try and shoot a hoop, though you had to be reasonably near the hoop to do so (because we were young and weak.. and it is pretty hard to shoot a ball when you're on rollerblades). 2 points if you were in the near zone (roughly a 4 metre section around the hoop), 3 points if you were on the older purpley coloured pavers. Games usually went to 20 before we stopped for drinks and maybe swapped teams, though I think one particular game went something like 43 to 35 or something. Body checking was allowed, to a limited extent, and you could steal the ball from your opponent's hands. You had to bounce the ball while moving and, similar to basketball, if you stopped bouncing the ball you have to pass it off. Collecting rebounds off the walls was allowed, but didn't count as passing the ball off if you had stopped bouncing it. Quite a few years were spent playing this game.
One Christmas, we all got plastic ice hockey sticks, so we developed a version of Blade Hockey. I can't remember exactly how this worked, as it wasn't as popular as Blade Ball, but I think that you were able to score in either goal (same places as the Safe Zones in Blade Ball). If a team scored, the other team had to start from that goal and could not score in that goal until they had passed halfway (roughly the same place as the basketball hoop). One point per goal, play to 10 or 20.

After a few years, my brothers gradually lost interest in blading and picked up Scooters. I, however, kept blading. We would go to Speers Point walkway a couple of times a month (nearly every weekend in the summer), and then the beginning of the Fernleigh Track opened. Unlike the Speers Point walkway, which was all open around the lake (which is still quite good), this track was through bushland on an old abandoned railway. Trees constantly formed a canopy overhead. There is also a long tunnel that's maybe two hundred metres long. From one direction, where we usually started, this is slightly uphill. Obviously, this means that coming back is a blast, as I gunned it as fast as I could through there and there was also usually a tailwind coming through.
As the track got longer over the course of a few years, this became my favourite place in the world. I basically stopped going on my blades to Speers Point (though still occasionally went cycling... and if I wanted a change in scenery) and spent more and more time on the Fernleigh track. This continued on throughout uni. I bought a new pair of blades at around 20 (after wearing the wheels on the BladeRunners to about half of their original thickness and near points, despite semi-regularly rotating the wheels around to limit that effect). These new ones were light grey Nike (yeah, I didn't know they did blades either) and were quite comfortable (I think that the BladeRunners were just a touch small for my feet), smooth, stylish and very responsive. Just as good as the Bladerunners, in my opinion, for a recreational set.
By the end of Uni, I was going to the Fernleigh track several times a week (an open timetable helped me out immensely here). At one stage, I started looking in to racing blades, ones with larger 90+mm wheels and 5 wheels per blade... but at the time, money was an issue and, if I genuinely wanted to race, I would have to go to Sydney constantly. No Thanks.
Every time I would go, I would do at least two laps (Adamstown to Whitebridge and back, as that was the limit of the track at the time... roughly 5.5kms in one direction).

I left Newcastle to go to Kalgoorlie after I finished uni. I didn't take the blades because I had no idea what to expect... and weight/space limitations on my bag were also a factor. Upon getting here, I bought a bike and cycled around everywhere looking for decent pathways. As it turns out, most of the pathways here are of a type that would make them fairly Blade Unfriendly (particularly if you were using Polyurethane instead of the PVC type... too gravelly, would chop up the wheels in no time), though amusingly there are quite a few of the regular roads that would be quite suitable for them, so I stopped that train of thought and got used to the fact that my non-Team-Sport-Outdoor-Past-Time would be limited to Cycling (still not a bad choice, but not my ideal). And, as it turned out, a lot of my weekends would be taken up by hockey and, eventually, work, so I would not even really do that too much after the first year I was here.
I missed rollerblading. One of the first times I went back, I found out that they had fully extended the Fernleigh track. When I had left, it was from Adamstown to Whitebridge (about 5.5kms). When I got back, it was all the way to Belmont... 15kms. Well... obviously, given that I hadn't bladed in about a year (?) at this point in time, I wasn't going to give that a go... this time. Cycling, however, was all up for grabs. As it turned out, the extended portion of the path is quite hilly. I would have to rethink my strategy for this for next time...
The next time I came across, about six months later if I recall correctly, I had been on a training program at the gym and was possibly in the best shape I had been since giving up FreeRunning/Parkour four or five years earlier (probably better in the upper half of my body). I was still the fastest runner at the Hockey Stadium and easily the fittest on my team. So I gave it a go on my old Nikes.
And BOY DID THAT HURT.
I think my best before heading to Kal was doing a Speed Run with 3 laps of the ~11km circuit over the course of maybe an hour and a half and I once did four or five laps over the course of an afternoon.
Here, without having bladed for 18 months/two years, it took me over two and a half hours to do the 30kms. I got grey vision semi-constantly and at one time nearly gave up. The muscle groups I had not used in years... they were giving up. For the next three days, everything ached.

So, for a while, I gave up the thought of blading entirely.

Until the end of last year.
I started getting the itch again.
I thought about it for quite a long time before deciding that I would get some and give it a go again shortly after my holiday to New Zealand (possibly partially inspired by the sheer amount of skate parks they have there... seriously, every town with a population greater than 100 has at least a half pipe and a street section over there). Realistically, I thought, I could use the roads at the north end of Kal, as well as the footpath around the outside of Kalkurla park. It definitely would not be any Fernleigh Track.... but it would be something.
After deciding that I would get something around my birthday (April), I thought about what sort. Obviously, there was the option to get the recreational skates that I used to use. Fun, reliable, common and fairly cheap. I also tried looking for Mountain Skates: Roller Skates (i.e. 2x2 per skate) that had large (150+mm) plastic/rubber wheels mounted to the side of the shoe component. Had the advantage of being designed for rugged terrain, but also the advantage of being able to slip in whatever regular shoe you wanted to there. I could, theoretically, skate to work. Awesome. However, these types of skate are elusive and the ones I was looking for were for a company that appears to have gone bust.
What about Aggressive Blades? I had never really been a Skate Park sort of person, only ever having been to a skate park maybe three times before... and all while I was still in High School (so... roughly 10 years ago) but it would be guaranteed smooth solid ground. I had actually once did a project (Year 10 Computer Science), where I designed a website about aggressive blading, including tricks, tips, terminology and pictures (got good marks for it too, because at the time I had self taught myself some HTML and Animated GIFs. Good Times). I had once wanted to do aggressive skating, but was hamstrung in multiple ways. I didn't have money or time to look for proper aggressive blades. Also, I was/am weedy, and was easily intimidated by things like groups of taller stronger people. I have a lot of inertia when it comes to fear, fear-of-failure and doing something I have never done before. To cap this off, and this will be looked at in a future post, bladers were, at the time, basically thought of as the lowest rung of the heirarchy at a skate park (this was at the time before scooters became commonplace and bladers basically invisible).
Times change, and no one here rollerbladed (possible exception: I once saw a guy in his early 20s on blades rolling around near the courthouse here... that may have possibly been the trigger point inspiration initially). It would be something different. It would be something that I had wanted to do. It might even drive me out of the rut that I had generated for myself around that time.
The more I thought about it, the more it appealed. This thought was cemented when I received a newsletter from the council that, among other things, said that the skate park was getting an upgrade to more than double its size. I'm not hugely superstitious, I don't think, but there are times where I convince myself that the universe is trying to speak to me... and so I took this as a sign.
So I went to the internets to do some research. I remember my friend John, back in high school, waxing lyrical about his middle brother's Roces (they're a skate company). So I looked them up and... didn't really like what I saw. These were odd looking, block shaped shoes with tiny wheels. I wanted large wheels because they hold their speed better. However, as I searched deeper, this appeared to be a common thread among all of the current types of Aggressive Skate. I figured that the smaller wheels were useful because you probably DO want a speed limitation when trying half-pipe/downhill manouevres. Well... that was not impressive... But there were quite a few interesting differences to the recreational and aggressive blades that I remember. Significantly, design in aggressive blades appears to have gone from having four small wheels with a gap between the second and third for rail slides, to two small wheels on the first and fourth positions and two smaller "anti-roll" or "anti-rocker" nylon wheels, and a gap between those too. Apparently is significantly better at grinding and half-pipe coping tricks. Also, aggressive blades now have very prominent outer soles which are apparently useful for slides and grinds.
I settled on an Australian Online Outlet store called "Skater HQ". They are based in Manly *shudders* and sold a fairly wide variety of blades. Eventually, I chose the Razor "Cult Street" blades, as the reviews seemed to say that they were fairly beginner/intermediate friendly and they looked reasonable.

Several weeks went past and, the day after the park shut down to start the upgrades, my new wheels arrived. I unashamedly giggled like a school girl when I opened the box. They looked fantastic and, despite their bulky appearance, were lighter than they looked. It was hard to get in to them, however. It appears as if I have blades that are about half a size too small for my feet. I was tempted to send them back... but decided to give them a trial run near Kalkurla park the next weekend. Maybe they just need to be worn in and stretched out a little like regular shoes.
The weekend rolled around and my testing of them was quite interesting. When I go home and try on the old blades, they feel smooth. All four wheels on the floor make turning and pushing off/speeding up easy... the exact opposite of these blades. The wheels themselves are slightly rounded on the surface, compared to the virtually flat wheels of the aggressives. The aggressives felt a little... odd. Rolling around was not as smooth and you could feel every little bump in the footpath (though this is not necessarily a bad thing: doubles as a foot massage... if you have correctly sized and fitted blades). On top of that, because of the much smaller size of the wheels on the aggressives, the way I used to skate (with a lot of lateral pushing, means that the wheel frame occasionally dragged on the ground as I pushed. Hmm... a change in skating style may be needed... but, at least the blades felt good when moving around. Hard to get on and off... but smooth.
Definitely rusty though: I could barely do the smooth 180 degree toe-turn that I used to be able to do in my sleep. Also, skating backwards was virtually impossible.

A few weeks went past and I tried out the blades again. Still hard to do anything with... but I managed to remember/build up confidence to jump. Not well... but it was a start. Eventually, the skate park reopened. I looked at it one night on my way home from the shops. The park had been extended more than originally anticipated, and the basic footprint of the park was now about triple the original size. Brilliant, I thought, More room for more people. A few times before the original park was closed, there was always a huge number of people waiting in line to take their turn for their runs. Because of this, there were also huge crowds of various skaters and riders that hung around. I imagine that for the smaller kids and individuals, this made for an incredibly uncomfortable situation. With the larger grounds, it would be more spread out, more space for people to do runs, less crowding of groups, more people-friendly. After viewing the area itself, I was feeling pretty good about my choice. It was fully concrete, with more than a few areas that had metal coping/edges, making slides and grinds an easy (almost too easy) prospect... not that I had ever done any before. There were a few good areas where you could transfer from one section to another. The new giant bowl section looked simultaneously amazing and... well... frightening. In some sections, it was double the size of every other half/quarter pipe section in the park, the turns quite tight and it was quite narrow. Not my cup-of-tea yet, but maybe one day. The rest of the area had a pristine feel to it, with smooth entries/exits to virtually all of the ramps/pipe sections.
This could be fun.

The weekend rolled around, and I drove in to the parking area. I pulled on the blades that I hadn't touched for about two months at this point. It was about 10am and the area was largely unoccupied. Strange, I thought, but not a bad thing for a newbie. I watched for a few minutes as the scooter kids rolled around, as well as the BMX riders (it seems that skateboarders don't really start to surface until about 11am or later). This was also to steady myself and relearn what it was like to have wheels on my feet at the top of a ramp.
And so I rolled.
It was a little shaky, and coming up the ramp twenty metres down the path was quite unusual because I had underestimated the speed I would need to get up it... but it was a start. After about 20 minutes of simply rolling around, learning to ride up and down steep ramps again, I decided that I would try something different. Actually Jumping.
My first attempt went basically as well as you could imagine: Flailing like mad and giving myself a heart attack as I raised no more than twenty centimetres off ground. As the day wore on, I started getting better at it and managed to do a few little things with it as well, like a skate grab and 180 spins.It was interesting to note that the BMX riders actually stopped to look at me, and I could hear them say things like "Huh, he's got rollerblades? Never seen that here before." Confirmed the "no one in Kal has used them" theory nicely. Indeed, as the day wore on, I got questioned by various people, from young scooter kids to the older BMX and Skaters, as to how long I had been blading (to which I gave the short answer "I haven't been to a skate park in about 10 years"). Invariably, though, there were more questions like "Can you do anything with them?", "Can you 360/backflip/grind?" and the always amusing "Have you ever Faceplanted?".
"Baby Steps," I would tell them. "This is only my first day in a skate park. Gotta start somewhere and get the basics right." Which is true with something that can make you end up in hospital if you screw up.
More details in an upcoming post on skate park etiquette.

By the end of the day, I had developed sore shins from not being used to the blades rubbing against them, nor the forces imparted by jumping from ramp to ramp, and also a jarred finger from a misplaced hand when attempting to grab a blade mid-air... but it was totally worth it.
A pleasant day, and hopefully the start of something Fun.

It is always amusing when a new batch of younger kids rocked up to the park and saw me. They'd come up and ask the questions above and, assuming that I hadn't been temporarily knackered from a previous run, I'd pull a 180 and/or grab off the nearest ramp. You could hear them cheer and maybe later on they would come up to me and say that they thought I was cool.

That's right.
10 year olds think I'm cool.
Life Dream Achieved.

That said, in some interesting way, it was also pretty good to see that a few of the older people were showing some interest too. I spent a few minutes chatting to a guy who was there with his two kids. He said he used to rollerblade back in Sydney. In those days, he said, you would get 5 Wheel blades and remove the middle wheel to create a grind plate. Then you'd go to car parks and "try not to ax yourself grinding on the metal beams." We then discussed a bit about how the designs of blades had changed over time.

Just yesterday, I had a few interesting incidents.
I went to check out the park to see the conditions (we had some rain the night before, and I wanted to see how damp the ground was). On my way out, somebody recognised me as "The Rollerblader" and asked if I was going to be coming back.
After I got back, during a lull in other skaters/riders doing anything, I started working on attempting to do a transfer from one ramp to another over a largish obstacle. It involved doing a large circuit around about half of the old section of the park. Figuring out what I was doing, the group of riders/skaters actually stopped what they were doing to clear the area, and shouted for others to do the same. That was pretty nice. After a few attempts where I made it on to, but not directly over, the obstacle, I did have one shot directly over the top. Would have been better if I didn't come a major cropper on landing. Rolled laterally once but managed to keep the momentum going and got back to my feet quickly. Upon skating back to the area where they were loafing about, I got a comment:
"You got up quickly after stacking it."
"Yeah, just gotta keep going with the roll."
"Respect."
Despite that fall basically shaking my confidence for the rest of the day, felt pretty good after that interaction.

Later on had a ~16 year old come up and say that he thought what I was doing was pretty good because "it's gotta be hard on two wheels." Also pretty good.

Current plans are to work on actual rollerblade/life dreams:
- Learn to skate halfpipes
- Learn to ride backwards down ramps (and eventually halfpipes), which will make it easier to do various trick jumps over ramps
- Learn to grind
- Handplant on the top of a halfpipe
- Learn to 540
- Keep having Fun.

~4300 words in ~200 minutes over about a day
(by the way... I'm going to start keeping track of any articles I post, in terms of words written and time taken. This should help me see how on track I am for the NaNoWriMo project. At this stage, it's looking pretty good.)