8/1/20
It’s August. 2020 has been somethin, huh?
I went to the New Britain park this morning to enjoy another day of not climbing an ollie mountain. After the break I gave my legs yesterday, I was ready to have some fun in the bowl.
The park was pretty much empty at 7 am. There were two kids there who left shortly after I started warming up. After they left, I was the best only skater at the park.
I practiced my line in the bowl a handful of times and gave my legs some time to get with the program. After a couple runs of linking up the loop I’ve been working on, I was hit with a pretty cool feeling.
I can do it. is what I thought. Actually, I think I said it out loud. As I sat there looking at the bowl, I remembered back to over two years ago. Sitting in the office scoping out skateparks on Google maps working. I found this park. I saw the satellite image of this bowl.
I wanted to ride it, but that fear man. You haven’t ridden a skateboard in over a decade, get back to work, you have a job to do, can’t go get hurt doing silly boyish shit like skateboarding.
That was the mentality. But I couldn’t unsee that image of the bowl. And then it got re-done, made even nicer.
I bought my Nomad deck shortly after. That sat in my living room for a few months before I worked up the nerve to go to the Cutting Edge shop to get it set up with trucks & wheels.
I rode it down the street maybe twice, the feeling of a skateboard rattling my legs was foreign. The board sat in my garage for another year and a half. Maybe making an appearance once or twice in the driveway when friends were over.
Then, thanks to this freakin’ pandemic, I got back on it. Now, almost a hundred days after I decided to ride every day, I’m just glad I didn’t succumb to that fear.
So as I sat there on the deck of the bowl, I felt free from fear. Not rid of it, but it’s grip felt just a tad looser. In skating, but also in every other aspect of my life.
After that little reflection, I dropped back in for a few more loops. On one of them, my front wheel clipped the coping on a backside carve.
At that moment I think my next goal popped up. I’ve been wanting to learn backside 50-50 stalls on the coping, then eventually work them up to a 50-50.
I decided it was finally time to scuff up my pristine trucks, and walked over to the mini-quarter pipe at the other end of the park. I warmed up with some kickturns, and then remembered what I watched in a YouTube video.
Then I got after it. After all the practice in the bowl and practice on the transition at the Newington park, it actually came pretty quickly to me!
There’s a goal forming here. I’m gonna chew on it a little more, but it was super fun to learn a new trick today!
MikeFundaro.com 