This afternoon I was walking out to my car and as usual I spent a couple of minutes fiddling with the various skateboards hanging on the wall out there. It’s just too hot to skate here in Texas right now, so the poor boards hang there forlorn, their special purpose not being enacted. This saddens me greatly.
One of the boards is my freestyle board.
For those not in-the-know, a freestyle board is a skateboard that is a bit smaller than a typical board, and it is designed for very technical flatground tricks. They tend to be significantly narrower. A standard board these days range from 8″ wide to about 9″. That’s typical. A freestyle board is about 7.3″ to 7.5″ wide. There are a few slightly wider, but you get the picture. The narrowness facilitates doing tricks in which the board flips, like kickflips. The relative shortness facilitates a number of other very technical tricks, but it all really boils down to smaller is easier to manipulate.
For most of my skateboarding life I have been known as “the freestyle guy.” Freestyle is a very small niche within skateboarding. In my early days in skateboarding, the late 1970s, good skateboarders were expected to be good all-around. That meant they could do freestyle, skate bowls, do slalom, etc. So that’s what I did. I became pretty good at freestyle because finding a flat parking lot in which to practice was a lot easier than finding a bowl. I could practice freestyle every day. Back then there was no such discipline as “street skating.” There was only skateboarding.
I had the good luck of living in a neighborhood with alleys running behind our houses. Most of the driveways were sloped up. So we could skate the alleys as if they were snake runs or ditches. I became good at skating large flat banks because of this. In fact, while people still seem to thing of me as a freestyler, banks and ditches are my preferred terrain, and really always have been, but I do love skating flat ground and doing tricks.
When the Covid pandemic hit in 2020 I was forced to stop my regular heavy freestyle practice sessions. For the previous 6 years I’d been practicing a lot and going to contests in Germany when I could. It was a lot of fun, and those trips are some of my best memories of my life in skateboarding. But with the pandemic in full swing and simultaneously a wife battling breast cancer (and thus immunocompromised) I simply couldn’t afford the risk of breaking my ankle or whatever and ending up in an emergency room full of Covid patients.
So, I stopped flipping the board. I totally stopped. No kickflips. No rail flips. No 360 shove-its. Not caspers.
Instead, I began thinking much more about the simplest elements in skateboarding. Simple but not necessarily easy. Flowing. Turning. Different kinds of kickturns and pivots. Spins. Wheelies. Footwork. Creatively linking those elements into smooth flowing carving turns. Sliding into different positions.
This has become my preferred way of skating now. On flat or on banks. I have no interest in flipping the board or getting airborne in any way. Zero. Zilch.
Today when I was looking at my freestyle board I realized the depth of this change in my preferences. I’ve known for a long time that I’m having more fun with my current way of skating and didn’t have much desire to go back to my old ways, but today I realized very abruptly that I have NO desire to go back. And that feels – not weird at all.
One might think “Bob’s getting older and his afraid or weak, or afraid AND weak.” Not true. Today I spent 4 hours at a very strenuous aikido seminar. At 62 I have excellent agility. I can move with grace. I can do huge breakfalls without injury. If I wanted to do kickflips and whatnot I could.
I just don’t want to. At all. If I never did another “technical” freestyle trick again I wouldn’t miss it at all. I just don’t enjoy doing them anymore.
Here’s something I filmed last year. I’m riding a fairly big board. It is representative of the kind of thing I enjoy doing now. Rolling, flowing, spinning, turning. On flat or on banks. There are endless combinations of the basic elements of skateboarding. Putting them together in sequences with flow in and out is a challenge. It feels good. That’s the thing. This kind of thing is connected to the Earth. It’s about movement, not board manipulation. This is what I like now.
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