Bob's Pandemic Skating Journal
12/3/2020
As you might guess from the name of this site, I've become obsessed not just with the small spots and tricks, but the small details of tricks. Even with tricks most would not consider "tricks."
I'm interested in movement and flow on the skateboard. That's what I've been working on this year. Not flip tricks, or shove-its, or air. Flow and movement.
Here's a particular sequence I'm trying to master right now and really make it look good. For sake of brevity in my notes, I call the whole sequence The Mystic Weasel.
It's a series of 360s and 180s and Endovers strung together. You fakie carve into it, swing into a carving fakie 360, and continue the movement. Rather than simply pivoting in place, each swing of the board is supposed to cover ground, so the entire time you are doing these small carving pivots, the board (and you) are moving through a larger spiral or circle. So it is a serious of smaller movements embedded in a larger outer path.
The devil is in the small details. In this case, smooth, instantaneous, seamless transitions from one pivot and carve into the next. The goal is no hesitation, so the entire thing becomes one long, continuous flowing movement.
This is what I'm obsessed by.
Here's some footage from the first day I started working on it.
11/20/2020
I started writing this article months ago, shortly after the pandemic of 2020 started. That would have been March, I think. It is now November.
I've gotta be honest. Other than not getting to skate with Dale, this pandemic hasn't changed my skating a lot. I skate alone most of the time anyway. It did ruin my plans for a trip to a freestyle contest in Germany, as well as a skate gathering in Austin in October that was cancelled, but my day-to-day skating is really unaffected. I'd like to skate with Dale and friends Chris and Paul, but really, I'm kind of a solitary skate-monk type by nature.
At the start of the pandemic, rather than my usual concentration on my freestyle board, I'd out in the evening and skate a parking lot for about an hour. A parking lot. It doesn't get much smaller than that. Sometimes I get extra wild and go to a different parking lot. For months the little ditch I often skate was out of commission due to construction. Now, in November, it is accessible again on only slightly messed up, but of course it gets dark early now, so I only hit it on weekends.
I have to admit that there are other problems besides the pandemic that are causing me a lot of stress, and frankly it's been hard to even want to go skate sometimes. I'm not prone to real depression, but I have considered the possibility that I might have it right now.
Here's the kind of stuff I've been doing.