Category: Pandemic Skating

Posts about skateboarding I posted during the pandemic

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The Mystic Weasel

This is a trick I’ve been working on. I guess it’s a trick. It’s more like series of little movements. The goal is to connect them with no hesitation between the little pivots. I’m getting closer. A few years ago I learned a similar series of moves I called the Magic Weasel, inspired by my friend Stefan Albert, in Germany who moves like a magic weasel. Smooth. So this is also inspired by him.

I like moves like this because they are useful in a freestyle contest run but are also fun on a street board. I practiced it today on my 9″ wide Mode pool board and my 8.25″ Mode pops. I’m going to try adding another 1/8th inch riser to the pops, and moving up to some 56mm wheels for better tail clearance during 360 spins.

As I’ve worked on this, I’ve come to understand a few things about it that make it good.

  • It isn’t just a series of pivots. What I’m trying to do is a series of pivots while I move in a greater circle. Sometimes if I cut part of it too short, the circle becomes more of a spiral, which is fine. Or it can be fine. It all depends on…
  • The transitions from one pivot to the next need to be smooth and instantaneous. I’m not quite there yet. Close, but not quite. In particular, after the first carving fakie 360, the transition to an endover pivot off the nose needs to be smoother, and to really keep it going it needs to project the motion a lot more behind the back.
  • That same transition into that endover — I do endovers that way all the time but I have never tried to draw them out and use them to project the motion in a curve. I’m getting better at that, and I think it will pay off on some other tricks I’ve been contemplating. This has been the most challenging part of this sequence by far. I’ve thought of bank/ditch tricks using this motion, but have never done them because I didn’t have it down. Now I will.

Anyway, I worked on this for an hour today. They started sort clunky and got better. Back at it tomorrow. This is how I do things. I just do that same thing over and over and over until I’ve got it.

Mystic Weasel Practice from Bob Loftin on Vimeo.

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Session

I’m not crazy about skateboarding when it’s really hot outside, but I’ve been unable to get out in the evenings, so today I went out at about noon. It was about 91°F, which is not as hot as it was supposed to get later. I managed to work in about an hour of skating while remaining hydrated. Same old stuff. Me rolling around a parking lot on a fairly big board.

It was just nice to roll.

 
 
 
 
 
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Skating when it’s way too hot.

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Skated

Went skating for a bit today. I hadn’t been on my board for at least two months. My legs felt like crap, and I nearly just went home, but I know from experience that if I’ve not skated in a while this is normal. Didn’t help that it was 1)daytime and 2)hot. Still, I ended up having a pretty good time. I just need to go about about 6:30pm, instead of 3pm.

Here I am farting around…

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Wheels

As noted before on this blog, maybe too many times, my favorite hard wheels are Bones Street Tech formula. A while back then started offering a slightly “softer” 99a wheel. I’ve never had a bad Powell wheel. They are all great. So I decided to give ’em a try. These are 54mm 99a, in the V1 shape (their standard profile wheel).  Unlike the other STF, these wheels don’t have a lathed surface, which is weird. I haven’t ridden them yet. Will report back on these later tonight.

The bearings are from Daddies Board Shop — there own brand bearing with built-in spacer and speed washer. They seem good so far.

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More, and more, and more

I got my hour of rolling around in tonight. Just rolling around.

This pandemic and the various associated stressors that have come with it have really made me just want to roll and do simple things. I have no interest in “technical stuff” now, and even though there’s the online World Roundup coming up, I really don’t care. I’ll film some stuff, I’ll send it in — and that’s it. Just – don’t – care to stress out about getting a “good run” together.

One of my favorite skaters is this guy Stefan Albert, from Europe. He skates like I would if I were younger and prettier. It’s alway funny to see his lines, because they are very much like the way I roll around when I’m just kind of letting the board roll and seeing where it goes when I start spinning.

Anyway, here’s the same line, twice. Backside slide to fakie to fakie 540 rolling it out a long way, into an endover or two while I think about what comes next. I like doing the fakie 540 like this, because there is enough energy to sling myself out of it with some momentum.

 

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More just rolling and turning and spinning.

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Parking Lot Hijinx

Took the Mode Pool board, which I’ve decided is a little better for my weird freestyle influenced version of street skating, to my oldest skate spot and just let the GoPro record a bunch of stuff. Not crazy about the fisheye effect and the way it makes distant stuff look even more distant, but it gets the job done. After about an hour the school district cop rolled up and told me the entire grounds of the school are closed, so I saluted and said very good sir, and was on my way. I’d gotten my skate in, and really, I’m not gonna win that argument. I mean, there I am in an otherwise empty parking lot, but how can she tell all the dumbasses on the playground to leave and not tell me the same thing? Well, she can’t. So off I went.

By the way – for hard wheel skating, there’s just no reason to buy anything but Bones STF.

Nothing mind boggling here – just sharing ’cause that’s how we pandemic.

Looks pretty good if you go to full screen on the vid.

Parking Lot Hijinx from Bob Loftin on Vimeo.

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“Street Skating”

I’ve been trying to get out and roll around about an hour a day. Usually from 7pm – 8pm. Earlier and the sun is in my eyes.

I’m not really doing anything hard. As long as I get some rolling in, and I’m used to the feel of my board, I’m good. Nothing serious. Just riding a street board with somewhat turny trucks. The looseness of the truck doesn’t make footwork easy, but I like being able to carve a nice arc when I’d skating like this.

One thing I don’t enjoy in my typical freestyle is that I think the necessary tightness of the trucks (and I don’t even ride them as tight as a lot of FSers do) destroys a lot of my fluidity and looseness. And those are two traits of my own skating that I think are OK. I’m not great at technical stuff, and I’m not a huge risk-taking badass. Of all the stuff I do in this little video, my favorite thing is the little arc I carve after that first line, as I’m passing by the camera. I really need to slowly loosen up my FS trucks a bit so I can get that same effect.

Video from Bob Loftin on Vimeo.

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G-Snap

So I was out “street skating” tonight. New board tonight. I like it. Anyway, I notice this particular little thing I do. And when I say “noticed”, I mean I’ve been doing this forever, but never really thought about what is going on. It’s such a little move, but it has a nice feel to it. Lots of directional changes.

Anyway, I slowed it down in this video.

Anyway, rolling forward, I set up like I’m going to do a g-turn, and you can actually see that the front trucks does make a very quick little arc, rather than just being an endover. That’s why I like doing this, I realized, because it sets up some physics where you kind of “sling” yourself out of it. Not saying it’s awesome, but it is a fun thing to me.

G-Snap from Bob Loftin on Vimeo.

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Plans go sideways

My plans for bank skating were ruined yesterday when I got to the little ditch I’ve been skating for 41 years. There was water running from one of the alleys that run on either side running into the ditch. This has never happened before.

This was my first trip to the ditch since they rebuilt the alleys last year. The edge of the alley has been rounded and lowered a bit, so that water now flows right into the ditch, rather than into the street. I suspect that during the summer, given the Texas proclivity for washing cars and watering lawns, it will be very hard to find the ditch dry from here on out.

I must admit that this very much soured my mood.

But that’s life as a skateboarder. Spots come and go. Even long running spots like this one eventually get ruined or outright destroyed. The skateboarder’s mind must be adaptable, and it is.

Here’s a goofy thing I made after leaving the ditch. I didn’t really skate well after the mental assault of my ditch being messed up, but whatever. The mission goes on.

‘Cause I got my own world to live through and uh
And I ain’t gonna copy you

If 6 was 9 from Bob Loftin on Vimeo.