Category: skateboarding

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Another good thing about Aikido

This week I went and practiced some flatland freestyle skateboarding for the first time in about 6 months. I skated great. Hadn’t lost anything. In fact, I skated better, and required practically no warm-up.

I credit 6 months of Aikido practice. The art has made me stronger, more agile, more flexible, and just improved my condition in general.

I’ve not been able to practice as much due to a sore knee, but that seems to be getting better. Last Saturday we did practice with the wooden sword. It was fun and fascinating, and started to reveal just how much of Aikido is based on swordsmanship. Very cool.

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Canon SD750 and video

Here’s a quick video, shot with my Canon SD750, of my friend Paul skating Havik skatepark. The video is compressed to a 9.5 meg QuickTime file — the original files are really good quality.

 Click here for the Quicktime file, or you can watch it in my VodPod widget down on the right.

For short clips edited together, I have to say that using the digital camera is a lot easier than using a camcorder. When you are ready to put them on the computer, you just dump the clips into whatever application you are using (in this case iPhoto and then iMovie). Much easier than finding and importing stuff from a tape. My camera takes pretty high quality video, which means big file sizes, but my 2 gig card was plenty. I may get an even bigger card for it. I can see using this for video a lot.

Sadly, this is the last week for Havik Skatepark. I’m sorry I didn’t make it out there until last night. It’s kind of far from my house, but I do think it would have been worth the drive a couple of times a month. I need to be more willing to drive a little to a good spot.

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Longboard ditch skating

My friend Chris and I hit the Glenville ditch, here in Richardson, for a session last night. Being extremely manly, Chris managed to seperate one of the wheels from the truck on his newschool board, so I shared my longboard with him. He’s a good longboarder, of course, so it was killer.

This was my first real attempt at skateboard photography with my new Canon SD750. The first shots were pretty blurry. Then I started using Auto mode, pre-focusing on the area I wanted to shoot, and then panning with the skater as he rode by. Pre-focusing reduced the shutter lag to almost zero, making it a lot easier to shoot. The result was a much clearer shot of the skater — pretty neat — good photos for a total beginner. Chris got some good shots of me too. Check out the rest by clicking here…

Funny, after so many years of longboarding, that 44″ board doesn’t feel or look that big.

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Some downhill skateboard racing

This weekend in the cities of San Marcos and Austin, Texas, downhill skateboarding enthusiasts gathered for the 2007 Cold Fusion Sizzler, which included giant slalom and downhill speed events.

downhill racerHere is a link to some video from Saturday. If it looks like they were going fast, they were. Top speed was over 50 mph. For those who aren’t skaters out there, 25mph is fast enough on a skateboard to be scarey. Over 25 and you really need a good helmet and safety equipment. In the 35+ range most serious riders use a full motorcycle helmet. At speeds over 20 mph, there’s a phenomenon called “speed wobbles”. Your front and rears trucks hit a weird point there they sort of sync into a wobbling oscillation, which is scarey. Usually if you just stay calm you pass the particular speed range and get out of the wobbles. Of course, at those speeds you really can’t just jump off. Doing giant slalom on a 50 mph hill is very ballsy. So my point here is that these guys are “real men” – even the women.

Congrats to everyone, in particular Chris Doan, aka gorillabisuits, and Greg Stubbs, representing DFW.