skate journal: solo colorado springs just because it’s dry (dec 28, 2014)
Woke up kind of late on a Sunday. The kids were gone at friends, Liz wanted some alone time and I wanted to skate. I looked at Pueblo and Co Springs webcams and saw they were mostly dry so just left without making any phone calls. I’m a loner. I went to the big Memorial park to start. Hardly anyone was there. It had a lot of goose crap and icy spots that made the parts I wanted to skate unskateable. I could tell I was very tired from the day before. I had almost no motivation to skate there. I really don’t like Team Pain skateparks. Seriously one of the biggest parks in Colorado and there isn’t one regular ledge? I like a lot of the unique creative rock piles they put in, but not one ledge? So stupid. So I left pretty quickly and went downtown, ate Chipotle then ended up at this alley. I was skating horribly for a long time. I was trying lines with a trick on the ledge (in the background) and a trick on the hip. I couldn’t crook the ledge. Beveled ledges and crooks don’t agree with me. I managed a couple though and got one with a b/s flip on the hip after. Coming the other way I would ollie off a sidewalk over a little cone, then a trick over a manhole (kickflip), kickflip on the hip then try front 50. But I was scared of shooting my board into the glass so I never got a clean front 50. I did noseslide to fakie then a bad version of of cab on the hip. In a brief period of decent skating I did a noseslide to fakie on the ledge, halfcab flip on the hip, back 180 the manhole and then bailed a halfcab flip on flat.
Then i went on a personal challenge mission of ollie’ing onto this ledge. I was so sore/tried it was almost impossible. I managed to get on it once with a lot of back truck grinding to get up it. Oh well. I’m gonna learn how to ollie darn it. I was probably in this alley for almost two hours. Ha.
Then I drove around for awhile and found this ledge. I knew I wouldn’t have the energy to 50 it with such a crazy setup, but I figured I could at least do one of those slappy switch noseslides. Well the switch run up proved to be way harder then I would have thought. So I started with front board fall out. The hill bomb after was a blast. I did it a couple times. Always with power slides. I’d rather slide and go slower then just bomb. It’s funner to me.
On the way up I noticed the bump above. It looked so fun. So then the goal was to do the switch noseslide thing, cross the street and ollie the bump. This was so much harder then it looked because of the crack about 3 feet before the curb. I managed to get it a few times though and wow it was more fun then I ever thought. I got a couple ollies somewhat over the little pipe sticking out. The first time I wasn’t looking far enough ahead and was flying down the sidewalk and realized there was a huge ice patch so I had to jump over it and run out. So scary. I love street skating.
Then I walked about 1/4 of a block and came upon this granite ledge on top of a narrow sidewalk. I didn’t think I would be able to do anything on it, but a few tries later I rode out of a crook. Hyped. I did a bunch more. Couldn’t do front 50 though. My legs were beat. After that I drove around for awhile, found a gnarly gap/bench spot at Colorado College, but felt too tired to skate it. Then I went to the Garden Of The Gods park. Got out of my car and felt like I shouldn’t be skating. A couple noseslides later on the tiny ledge confirmed it. My back foot came off and the razor tail bit my knee super bad. So bad I could barely walk back to my car. Ugh. Then I drove home. Happy that I street skated, sad that I didn’t skate well and sad about how much pain my knee was in.