Feeling a little better I was ordered to play basketball with Ollie after dinner again. It exhausted me even though it was pretty fun. It also blew out my shoe as you can see above. That is my switch foot so none of that came from skateboarding, the suede tore from the sole. So that meant new shoes. The Lakai Carlo shoes in the background. I have had then before and they are some mighty fine shoes. Jake came over and then we picked up Carleigh and Jack. Carleigh was hurt so just wanted to hang out and shoot photos. Like this one:

Jake had suggested a bump in a newly redone parking lot near Wahoos. The bump ended up not being so great, but we found some other fun stuff around. Jack was the first to front board the front of the tractor. Then he did all kinds of stuff on it like nosebonk, nosebonk front 180, all kinds of stuff. I managed some weird front boards on it, but I was happy about it.

We hit this too. Jake mannied it in a line with a kickflip. I got lucky and mannied it first try so started a night long battle with nose mannies. The slight downhill and metal grate was messing with me. Jack was ripping. Doing long lines, cruising around looking like he was having a blast. It was awesome to see. Jake suggested a new spot when I was mid battle with the nose manny then beamed me until I landed it. After that we played a game of SKATE that was nobody’s finest. It was fun though. Jack won. I blame the new shoes.

Again with the super exhausted thing and I’m not sure why. After tiring myself out even more I dropped by Meta right before they closed so I could pick up a flash drive and leave some wheels for Max. After chatting with John for awhile I went over to the slappy curb. About 10 slappy crooks later it started raining so I went home kind of excited that I would hopefully be getting some good rest.

This is sick!

I’m not sure what got into me, but I was super tired over the weekend. I got plenty of sleep and didn’t drink beers so I have no idea what caused it. All day I sat around, trying to get motivated. Finally Ollie said he wanted to skate so I knew I had to. We went to little arvada after stopping by and watching a bit of street league at Crisis. When we first got there the park was empty. Amazing. Ollie was cruising around with a huge grin doing little kickturns/grinds and genuinely looking like he was having a blast. I was sucking. Struggling with everything. Then some dudes came that were decent skaters, but they were just super loud and obnoxious and oblivious to the fact that there were kids (families at the playground a few feet away) around. It definitely bummed out Ollie and me. But we skated. I don’t think either of us did much. The only new thing I did there was a crooks on the steep bank. I got a rock ‘n roll on the shallow pool corner too, but I think I’ve done that before. Ollie did some rock ‘n rolls both ways on the little qp at the top, I got front feeb and smith on it and we called it a night.

Met up with Steve V (college buddy I haven’t seen in a couple years) at Crisis. Did some Null business, shot the shit with Fuzz, Dean, Conor and Blaine for awhile then headed over to the park. Almost no one was there. We skated the bowl to start. Deano was in the mix. Connor lost interest in about 2 seconds. We carved around, did some 50s, that was about it. I was surprised to get back 50 on the pool coping first try. We hit the street section for awhile and it was apparent quickly that I wasn’t on my A game. We kinda played on the quartapotty, blue ledge and that was about it. Steve is mostly a trannie skater so he was hyped ollieing onto the blue ledge. Dean was trying halfcab manuals and getting every halfcab up. That was sick. I had a couple no comply 270 to back tails, a few kickflips, then we went back to the pool. We couldnt drop in, but we carved around which was fun. I got a little tile in the shallow which hyped me up, but man that pool is hard to skate. Back to the bowl. If it wasn’t for my contacts being so dry and almost falling out mid runs I would have had a blast. Had a few tiny ollies, faster carves, rock ‘n roll, back 50s, front slash. Steve had a good time too, that’s him above. Then we went and hung out for awhile at Fuzz’s. Fun times.

So this blog was supposed to be more then it is. It was supposed to be video clips all the time, Colorado skate news galore, Dinosaur Jr news and my skate journal. Well thanks to Four, Null, family, work, etc lately it’s only been my skate journal. Sure it’s a little weird writing about my own skating all the time, but I’m doing this for me. I don’t want to forget these awesome days I am so lucky to have and I want to be able to read about days like this 20 years from now. Anyways, with that said, I had a horrible day at work and decided I would rather go skate with my headphones cranked up then drive to a ramp I’ve never been to before and watch Lifeblood/wizards rip. I was right. The kids were gone and Liz realized I needed some space as I watched the new Almost video (pretty good) then Quik (totally amazing) yet again then got on my bike and rolled to campus. I should almost call this entry “Dumb shit that only I would skate”, but there might be like two other people out there that would be down. Probably people that read this. Ha.

Lately I’ve been in this slappy noseslides for warm up mode and this little ledge peaked my interest. First try was a switch noselide which worked. Then front nose fakie. That worked too. Slappy front tail took a few tries, but got it. Noseslide to fakie up. This ledge slid a little, but not really. Front tail down. Front 5-0. Switch boardslide down (whoa!) and finally a front tail shove that slid. Good warm up for me! I should mention that there is no runway really for this, only what you can see there. One push.

Then I got some water in the engineering building and cruised downhill cracking little ollies and powerslides til I ended up here. Did wallride, rock ‘n roll slide, feeble and several treflips on flat. I started trying crooks since I can slappy them on curbs now and a few tries later got one. It even grinded. Might be cool to film that for Off The Couch 2 With A Vengeance sometime.

Now for the quick feet training part of the evening. Got quick ups and ollie down the 2 front 180 off the 1 which was way harder than I thought would be.

I walked up to this area next which is one of my favorite areas. I started wanting to do 360 flip into the first “bank” (it’s downhill, but it’s definitely not steep), kickflip into the next then manual one of the benches below. I got the treflip second try, bailed the kickflip then thought I would be able to get this quick. Nope, the next treflip took forever. Forever. And when I got it I bailed the kickflip again. Luckily I got another tre, got the kickflip, but didn’t have the juice to ollie up the bench well and had to settle for a crappy ollie to ride to fall off the ledge. Neat. Everytime I went back to the top I would try a random flip trick. At one point I felt like switch b/s flips were doable. Silly me. Next I tried kick back tails on the little ledge at the top of this photo. I got one, but it took forever and I was going ultra slow even for me. Oh well, kick back tail!

I took about 20 tries to ollie up this bench, then ollie onto the ledge, but it was fun when I got it.

This is the trick that surprised me the most, I ollied over this. Didn’t even take many tries.

Then I walked back to my bike and rolled home. Isn’t it funny how the reflection of the flash looks like I have ballin’ ass glowing rims? I gotta say it was a good day. Ha, seriously though this day was a favorite of mine and reminds me of when I was skating around St Louis all by myself skating whatever I felt like. Skateboarding rules.

Such an awesome night. I had to sell some boards to SOL after work so I went there, met up with Dean and waited for Trick Factory to show up in the Square State bus. They took so long that I was actually able to beat Allan in a game of foosball (granted I lost about 10 games). Then we hit the road to Fort Collins for the BBQ/demo. When we arrived it wasn’t that crowded, but that didn’t stop Jack and I from not skating the park. It quickly turned to chaos and any chance I had of skating the park was crushed. I watched for awhile. The Lifebloods and Blood Wizards were killing it. Especially this dude. The Fort Collins locals were shredding too. Watching skating is awesome and all, but it was super nice out and there was a perfectly good parking lot to be skated. I think I played four or five games of SKATE total. All with Jack, some with others included. I could go into tedious details, but I wont. I felt great. Arthritis was nowhere to be found, I had energy, etc. Super happy about that. Jack could have easily won all the games had he done tricks like switch heel, switch flip, etc. But he’s nice like that and would limit the tricks I couldn’t do to a couple a game. I think I landed almost every flipper I’ve ever done. Including a nollie tre and nollie varial flip in the same game. Fuzz had the three basic fakie heelflip tricks and the halfcab back heel took out everyone. It was a blast skating like this. I landed on several fakie tres and b/s flips, but never got either of those tricks. Only got one treflip too. But yeah, so much fun. At the end I started doing slappy crooks on a curb and one of the bigwigs at Lifeblood gave me a shirt. I’d like to think it was because he was hyped on the slappy crooks, but who knows, he probably just felt sorry for me. I did a few kickflips at this point that felt like the best kickflips I’ve done. Happy times. I tried to teach Conor how to do slappy crooks and rumor has it he landed one, but it sure took him a long time. Ha. A bunch of Bloods piled in the bus on the way home. Bonus.

Met up with Carleigh around 11 with the weather report claiming a 100% of rain by 2pm. It was humid, but not hot and still I began sweating right away. It felt good as did my legs. We were just kinda cruising around waiting for Dean and Crisis kids to meet up with us. I think I finally felt somewhat warmed up when they showed up. I had a little line of something like pop shove into the handicap ramp, kickflip on flat, crooks the bench. Conor starting doing long ass boardslides:

I did a little line of fakie ollie a crack then fakie bigflip into the handicap ramp. Yippee. After a bit I played Justin in a game of SKATE. We both took forever to land our tricks. I came out on top and was happy on landing a 3 flip pretty quick. Other then that I felt kind of awkward on a skateboard.

After that Dean and I headed to Denver and picked up Derek and Aaron. We were looking for a place to park and drove by “The only spot in Denver” and saw someone doing treflips down the street hauling ass. We were like who is that? Then another dude does a 100 mph kickflip up the curb and back tails the ledge. At that point Dean was like “Those dudes must be pro” and it clicked that the Krooked team was in Denver. Ha, it was Mike Anderson doing the treflips and Brad Comer. We could have lurked, but we moved on. Went to a gap Derek was thinking about. We messed around with some flatground and Aaron tried to ollie a fire hydrant, hung up and slammed about as hard as one can slam. It was like five full pushes to whiplash into the ground. He walked it off though and skated the rest of the day. We ended up at one of the funnest spots in Denver. I had some ollie up the curb, boardslides on the ledge then it was all filming for the rest of the day. Derek struggled on a feeble for awhile. Dean got a line. Aaron ripped it. I filmed. Ended up meeting Sunny Daze and I filmed Chad for awhile. Then it rained, we chatted with Tyler Bush for awhile about Four then the night was done.

Had a really blah and downer of a day. Got some stuff done early, but the day seemed to drag on without much happening. After a fun game of football with Ollie cheered me up I went to Valmont as the thunder clouds loomed above. The warm up period consisted of various slappy noseslides. Frontside, b/s, switch, etc. It was fun. Then I waxed the ledge beyond belief. I guess the wax was still warm as it had been in my trunk, but it went on so thick that Hulslander would be proud. I have been thinking about front tails a lot lately so I tried some. It was scary with how fast the ledge was and the first couple I got into slid so fast that I just kind of fell off to fakie which I was fine with. They were at least sliding which is rare for me and I followed one up with a f/s halfcab flip. I went for back 50, but did a back 5-0. Love when that happens. Also got back 50. Came close to kick back 50, halfcab noseslide and crooks to fakie. I did a ton of slappy crook stalls on the curb. Man that trick rules. I should wax that curb up too. Did a few flippers, nothing too special. Had trouble with front 50s. Never got a treflip. Got one front tail to forward that slid awhile. Then the rain came and it was total chaos. I went home and setup our new TV so the kids could watch Harry Potter. It’s my fourth TV. None of which I pay for and everyone of them has been slightly better then that last. This one was so heavy though. Can’t wait until people start getting rid of flat screen tvs.

The rain subsided for awhile and the street dried up in front of the house. I went out for awhile and started the long and tedious task of warming up. It wasn’t as bad as normal. I didn’t really land much before Ollie came out with his board wanting to skate a little. He did a fakie shove on the sidewalk and came close to some pop shoves. I had loosened my trucks a little and it seemed to help. For whatever reason I thought of trying a f/s nollie bigflip and landed on it first try, but fell off. Whoa. I got close on a few more and posed some switch f/s flips that were not close at all. Then we rolled over to the school. We went down the little handicap ramp and ollied over puddles. Ollie slid out pretty bad once it was funny. I started trying kick back tails going one way and front tail kickflip out the other. Both were remotely close. I got in to a lot of back tails, but had too much of an angle every time and would stick. The front tail kickflip out attempts were not slides and I’ve never even done a kickflip out of a tail stall before so to get remotely close had me excited. The rain came back though and ended that. Ollie had also been pushing fast and doing early grab cannonballs over cracks. He also had front and back 180s off the curb. So hyped he joined me.