How many people have a t-shirt that's designed with their skates?
'The Journey,' t-shirt is available in my shop.


Here's some extra back blurb of how this came about:
In 2011 I started inline slaloming. One rainy afternoon we were taking shelter under a bridge and I started seeing the cool patterns inline slaloming creates when the wheels went through puddles. It made sense this had to be taken further into design. Problem with water is that it spins out of the wheels pretty quickly and so the path won't be marked the whole way down the set of cones. Plus at the time being a novice to slaloming I couldn't be so creative with the footwork, so the idea was put aside for the time being.

In 2012 a video produced by Anne Joshua captured the movements by overlaying a path in post production. This technique worked really well and re-sparked my ideas.

We shot this video in Hyde Park so to get a better aerial view the camera was held on a monopod. (Thanks Gianni Dibiase for being cameraman). Naturally there was camera shake so the footage had to be stabilised before the motion paths could be overlaid. The skate paths were imported into Adobe Illustrator where a clean vector design was created. The paths were edited, incorporating correct gap spacing between elements so that it could then be screen printed onto a sports shirt.

Lastly the title refers to my belief in that it's not always about the destination but sometimes about how you get there, The Journey.

My 2013 New Year’s Challenge is to complete five slalom cones on just a single inline skate wheel. Either on one toe or one heel wheel. Before the start of the year I could wheely for about a second and managed a slight turn.

Today I managed to do seven cones! (It’s a pretty close 7).

I would like to eventually progress to a whole line of twenty cones. Still a lot to develop with this as I’ve seen people do it a lot slower with more control, but I did manage to also do a 360 spin whilst on the toe wheel. (need to video this). The thing is I’ve neglected my other tricks in the process, so I’ll therefore put the wheeling tricks aside for now...

One thing I found useful for doing a heel wheely is to start by doing a heel toe combination first (so on two skates). If you’re doing the toe wheel, start with a toe toe combination. By starting on two wheels you are more stable (as oppose to jumping straight on to the single wheel), then you can lift the stabilising leg with more control.

 

On bank holiday Easter Monday a friendly unofficial slalom competition was held in Hyde Park. This was my first competitive game. I wasn’t overly confident but it was great to meet the other slalom skaters on the scene and to see the high level that can be achieved. This was a chance to also experience a bit of public performance.



The main competition had two people facing off. Each person had two 30 seconds runs to do their fancy slalom stuff. Three judges then pointed to their favourite to go through to the next round.

I got knocked out in the first round but they had a wild card drawn to fill in an extra participant place. Guess who got that? It was hardly surprising but I got knocked out again. 



They also had a jump competition where you had to get over a bar. I’ve never considered myself a jumper but I thought I might as well play, especially as they set the first jump height at less than a foot.

On our earlier runs everyone did fancier jumps including 180s and I did a hop over on one attempt. As it got higher people got a little more focused. When I landed a jump I was waiting to hear the bar to hit the floor behind me. Much to my surprise I lasted a lot longer than I did. I managed 80cm in the end. The winner did 86cm. 



I didn’t perform my best that day on the slalom showdown but I did learn that I could jump a lot higher than I thought. Merry Easter!