I made this site because I couldn’t find a good slalom resource to save my life. Here I’ll post more or less a journal of my journey into pro slalom stardom. Links, videos, tutorials, and my personal progress.
Today I got my skates in the mail. I bought a set of Rollerblade Twister II Pros on eBay for $91 shipped. Not bad at all. I’ll take some pictures tomorrow.
I just got back from skating around, getting a feel for the skates (I haven’t really done inline skates before… I skate on them a few times my freshman year of college, but never again). I’m also kind of surveying the terrain around me, what’s skate-able and what’s not.
For instance, the area of Portland around the Waterfront is hardly skatable at all because it’s so rough. There’s a slight hill grade, too, making it fairly dangerous when there’s a crowd there (which there usually is). We’ll see how I fare once I get better.
My skates came with a heel brake attached. I know I’m supposed to remove it eventually, but I really need to keep it on until I’m more comfortable with a T-Stop, lest I go barreling into an unhappy person, tree, car, what have you.
I practiced the forward fish a bit, then moved onto the forward snake. I’ll do a small tutorial on that in upcoming posts, but bear in mind I’m far fome qualified to provide a tutorial. I can barely do them, let alone do them around cones.
Speaking of which, I don’t even have cones yet. Like I said, it’s my first time out, so I’m just trying to get comfortable. Cones will be a pain when I’m starting out anyway, since I’m terrible and will spend most of my time knocking them around. I might just chalk the supposed location of the cones and skate around that. If I put it in a discrete enough place, no one will notice and that can just be my practice area.
August 21, 2008 at 7:40 pm
You could always use a bit of crayon in a discrete area and discrete color so that rain does not ruin your spots and you don’t have to keep putting down spots every time.