skate journal: Valmont with Ollie (June 4, 2010)

Posted in Skate Journal on June 5th, 2010 by corpo

After dinner and some football tossing with Ollie we headed out to Valmont shortly before sunset.  When we got there Ollie said he’d wanted to skate that spot after seeing it in the Null videos.  Awesome.  I had a new Nulltron board complete with round 2 of the old man griptape idea.  All this stuff was supposed to be on the last one, but I ended up liking the old man too much by himself.  It’s obviously a complete exaggeration of the jockish things I feel like I need to do to skate without groin pain and to prevent other injuries.  Note that I couldn’t put a checkmark next to the ‘no beer’ one which I tried to hide anyway and is obviously not really on my checklist.Starting out was rough for me as my groin was feeling really sore.  It hurt to ollie.  I wasn’t sure I should be skating, but I kept at it mellow for awhile and the sharp pains went away.  The first part of the session was pretty bad for me and I skated slower than normal and just tried to get my body working.  I did a few basics on the ledge like front 50, front tail, front nose, back nose, back crooks, back 50.  Ollie was ripping.  He was having so much fun cruising up the escalator and ollie’ing off higher each time.  He got about half way up which seemed pretty tall for him.  He likes doing halfcabs a lot and tries some halfcab noseslides.  He kinda landed one, but it was more of a halfcab with a jib in the middle.  He tried some boardslides too and landed one to fakie with a bit of a lunch break.  Still sick though.  He had this little run going where he would ride through this little gutter that I’m sure no one else will ever skate, ollie the metal grate then front board (stall) 270 out then ollie off the loading docl.  So sick.  I was trying lots of flippers and failing so I started trying flippers I can’t normally land because it doesn’t fail as bad not landing something you shouldn’t land.  I’m good at run on sentences.  Anyways I ended up getting insanely close to switch flips.  There was a couple that I thought I was gonna ride away from.  Nollie flips and switch heels weren’t too far away either.  Near the end I started trying front 180s over a little crack gap followed by f/s halfcab noseslides.  I eventually got a really bad one and we called it at that.Next up we went across the street to explore and it ended up being a blast.  There were a bunch of manual pads, a 2 stair, a loading dock with a 4 stair on one side, some more bigger drops, etc.  Ollie ollie’d (damn it once again I never thought about how weird it would be to have a son named Ollie) the loading dock and did nose grabs off the 2 stair.  The 2 stair had another stair about 10 feet after it and I tried to ollie up then ollie up the 2 which I did.  But it was weird because of the downhill before the curb.  Ugh.  Anyways after awhile I started trying a run of a nose manual, ollie up the loading dock, then manual a sidewalk that drops to another sidewalk.  I got the first two almost everytime, but couldn’t get the manual manual.  Doh.  I blame it on the new board that feels huge and has more kicktail than normal.  Anyways I was having a blast.  Ollie was cruising around smiling having a blast and then after a few tries put down a legit back 180 off a curb.  Session done!  Super fun night.