For the past two months I’ve been getting use to my speed skates and even had a competitive half marathon in them. I wanted to try them out myself and discover any issues before having any lessons. Now seemed to be a good time for some professional guidance before I pick up any bad practice with my speed skates. The obvious person to go to for tuition was Mike Van Erp as it was his complimentary speed skating drill sessions that slowly changed my perceptions and got me interested in speed skating. Also not forgetting he is one of the London Skaters Speed Team coaches and was highly recommended by many of my friends. The course was held in Hyde Park that consisted of three, two hour lessons; plus a video review. It was suppose to be on consecutive weeks but the English weather got the better of us. A lot of the classes had to postponed but Mike was very accommodating when it overran into unscheduled weeks. One Saturday it was called off but he compensated us with a free additional practise lesson on top of what we’ve paid for, even though it was the weather’s fault. Top man. The class was for speed skating technique and ironically a lot of the exercises were done at a slow speed. It allowed us to concentrate on the nuances. Quite often the tasks would have made no sense to an outsider looking in, but they helped segregate to just one aspect of the leg movement. Mike made lots of big swooping chalk lines and shapes on the ground to aid us in understanding how he wanted us to skate. There were exercises that had us remove a skate. It really made you aware of how lazy one leg can be, while the other leg compensates. My slalom skating gave me a real advantage in some situations as I was already used to balancing in strange and awkward positions. One example is thrusting your front foot to carve left and right whilst your back foot is doing a toe roll. The video review was good to have. Mike filmed us all separately from three different angles using his GoPro from his recumbent bike. We all received a link to everyone’s video and a very comprehensive set of notes for each of us. Being able to see each other’s fault and plus points helps us be more aware of what exactly is good technique. He pointed tips specific to each of us for improvement too. While I felt more enriched with the theory of speed technique I’ve not immediately gone up a gear. These things take time. I said earlier about not picking up bad habits. Mike pointed out that as I have been skating for over twenty years with the typical ‘street,’ style skate it would actually be harder for me in some ways over a newbie to re-program my skating style. So practice is what I need to do now. Lots and lots. Especially at slower speeds. (So I can go faster!).
0 Comments
Too much food was bought for our group trip to Le Mans. (You can never have too much food). So we had picnic the following week to help use everything up. Best idea ever.
It was so nice to get everyone together, especially those who couldn't make the trip to France. We had plenty of entertainment that day: - This was my second time on the freeline skates, but still with little progress. - A great skate instructor, Mike Van Erp also gave us a brief introductory on roller hockey before we got stuck into a friendly game. This was my first time playing hockey on skates, it was really fun but I can imagine the likelihood of injuries would be quite high when you start to get more competitive! - I had my second day on speed skates too. Loving the oomph of my new toys. I stretched my legs around Hyde Park. Going up South Carriage Drive was particularly good with noticeably less effort and strides. My friend Richard who is an experienced speed skater gave me a lot of pointers, particularly that my technique is too 'street.' So whilst I can thrash around with bursts of energy, I wasn't exactly efficient for longer sessions. Another skater Gib very kindly let me practice some speed skating drills with him. I think I've underestimated the technicality of the whole speed thing… Overall it was a fantastic day out in the sun with good people and lots of different ways of rolling! After the excitement of Le Mans and a timely work bonus I was in the Club Blue Room skate shop again. This time I was after speed skates, my friend Tom came too looking for some slalom skates.
I tried on a couple of pairs and I was expecting them to feel like wooden clogs after hearing about other peoples' experiences of speed skates. They were all a lot more comfortable than I imagined. Powerslide Double X is what I was drawn towards. The manager, Dave saw me trying them out around the shop. Dave mentioned he has them too and how great he's found them to use. They're also heat mouldable so certain areas can be stretched to accomodate individual foot shapes. Heat moulding is something Club Blue Room do as an after are service but there's nothing stoping you from doing this at home if you know how. I tried them out a little longer and just out of curiosity I tried doing a double toe wheely in the shop. It worked, the response and control I had with the skates felt good. Sold. Tom also got his slalom 'Hardcore Evo,' skates. We could have been on the advert for Powerslide skates with the way we both came out of the shop beaming. Christmas had come early. Our first destination was Hyde Park. I said to myself I'd be sensible and take it easy on my first outing on speed skates. However this bike zoomed past. Challenge accepted. The power transfer with the speed skates is just so much more efficient than my other slalom and recreational skates. I managed to overtake the bicycle before the end of the Serpentine Road where I slowed to turn back around. The bike stopped at the end too, I thought he was going to have a go at me for something silly as certain cyclists have a thing against skaters. It's all a bit silly, like some kinda of old fashioned racism However he was really interested in how fast I was going. That's something I've always wondered myself... After some more runs I decided to join Tom in the slalom cones too. Probably not the best skate for slaloming but I manage some toe wheeling. Also the 'Special,' but out of cones. (I can't do the Special with my actual slalom skates anyway). I forgot to film the Special. A lot of people were warning me that it'll take months and months to build ankle strength in order to get used to speed skates. I was already purposely building up my ankle strength anyway, but for slalom toe wheeling and I think that really helped prepare me for my new skates. So what I've come to believe is that slalom skating has fed into my all-round skating, street skating and now speed skating too. I didn’t feel one hundred percent ready yet Natalie Ujuk (who I had slalom lessons with), encourages everyone to get involved, regardless of ability. From every experience you’ll gain something from. I agree with this approach, yet reluctantly I agreed to partake.
This is my first formal slalom competition which consisted of three events. SPEED. It’s the fastest time to go through a set of 20 cones on one foot. Penalties were given to your final time if any of the cones were knocked. Before the actual run we had a warm up. I couldn’t even do the whole line of cones without the crowd pressure. Therefore when it came to the actual competition I didn’t do much better. I was somewhat annoyed with myself as I had done this countless times without too much trouble. SLALOM BATTLE. You’re in a group with four other skaters and you each have two runs of 30 seconds to show your stuff. I’m not entirely sure on the exact rules but the judges are looking for style, control, complexity and variety of tricks. Knocking cones over will knock down your score. I again didn’t do as well as I normally skate. My failsafe tricks even failed. I decided to just go for a heel wheel slalom as an attempt to keep on par with my competitors but with no luck. To be honest though even if I skated my best that day, everyone else skating that day was just SO much better. It was inspiring to see them compete though. (Video is above, but recording cut before the last run of the final contestant). JUMPS. Unfortunately the rain started coming down hard so this did not go ahead. Summary. It was not my best day of skating. A bit of public performance is good for character building, as they say. However I usually I like to slalom in my own little bubble with my headphones plugged in. Probably the high pace techno they played didn’t help. (I prefer a bit of Hotel California to slalom to). I must say I didn’t really enjoy the event itself but I’d hate to leave my slaloming career short lived with this negativity. At some point I’ll be back. On a positive note I was really touched that some of my friends gave up their afternoon to support me. Also I am now an official World Ranked Inline Slalom Skater! How funny is that? #776 Freestyle Slalom Mens (out of 979). #531 Speed Slalom Mens (out of 859). 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! I took up slaloming in 2011 and made good steady progress, however in 2012 it all slowed down a little. The learning curve seemed to have become steep for the more complex tricks. As I learnt new moves, some of the earlier tricks got left behind and were never truly perfected.
I decided to attend another slalom workshop to help get things going again and to have any bad habits pointed out. My workshop was with Natalie Ujuk, she is an ICP Slalom Instructor (ranked #1 in the UK and 17th in the World in Freestyle Slalom). Natalie is a part of the Skate Freestyle group, the same team as Megan and Tim with whom I had my first workshop with. Before our lesson Natalie invited us with requests for the weekend. I’ve been hacking at this trick called the ‘Twister,’ I had seen on the internet so asked for help on that. (She later said she learnt that trick that week so she could teach it that weekend). Secondly, when I first started learning I saw lots of people learning the toe trick ‘Swan.’ I wanted to learn that too. There was snow on weekend of the workshop so the obvious Hyde Park spot was a no go. We went to some sheltered basketball court by Royal Oak instead. It wasn’t as good as Hyde Park, the surface is a little patchy in place. However in weather like this it was the best thing available. Firstly Natalie gave us a check sheet for us to go through and self-assess. It had all the core tricks we should all know as they are the foundations to the more advanced moves. This gave us a time to reflect on ourselves and approach things which we may have been neglecting. A few people have had lessons with Natalie before, but for myself and others this was Natalie’s first chance to observe and gauge what level we really were at. Only then was she able to put us into subgroups. The first day for me was about tidying up everything. My ‘nelson,’ wasn’t quite a ‘nelson.’ Once my bad habits were corrected I learnt the ‘Mega,’ which is a combination of forwards and backwards nelson. It was a good move to know as it changes your weight from left to right very quickly, making you a bit lighter on your feet, less heavy weighted from doing just a line of nelsons. ‘X,’ was another move I learnt. It looks quite cool when done right, especially the jumping variation of this manoeuvre. The reason why Natalie wanted me especially to do this move as it then led on to the ‘Special,’ which is exactly the same as X but all on toes. So whilst I did not learn the Swan that weekend, the Special will help me up the trick ladder to Swanning. For the Twister she gave me some pointers to help me out. ‘Aim for the later step,’ was something that stuck in my head which seemed to give me more progression. To end the weekend in front of everyone we had to individually go down the line of cones and show what we had achieved from the workshop. However I don’t actually like people watching just me, or knowing that people are watching just me. (It goes for a lot of other things too, not exclusive to skating). I messed up my run and ended up kicking all the cones. So then I tried the things I normally can do and it wasn’t any better. I bailed a bit earlier than I intended, blaming my aching legs from a whole weekend of skating. Everybody else did there runs better than myself. Having seen the tricks people were working on, it was great to see they had nailed it during the weekend. I was a little disappointed I couldn’t show what I’ve done too. Public slaloming is something I need to work on, especially as it always seems draw in a crowd on the Serpentine Road in Hyde Park. Overall though it was a good weekend session. Natalie was very patient with each of us and she catered to our different levels. If we didn’t understand what she was saying she’d find a different way of explaining. This weekend I’ve resparked my slalom interest as I now have plenty of more tricks to play with. An instructor, Mile Van Erp had been holding some speed skating drill sessions over the winter. It wasn't so much a lesson but he got us doing strange exercises that focuses on specific areas of your technique.
For me I had no interest in speed skating but it was an evening during the week where I got to do some skating/exercise with my friends. The drills were pretty weird, the drill names were weirder. Lemons, Awoogas, etc. Mike said we should all be aiming to land on our outside edge, this concept sounded frightening. It wasn't until one evening I watched a slow motion video of a speed skater that the pieces started coming together and I began to understand what we're aiming towards. Being able to already do lots of slalom tricks I decided that I should be capable of doing this outside edging technique. Difference is that slalom tricks are generally done at a slow pace when compared to speed skating, that's what made the idea a little scary. With this edging technique I've tried a couple of times but lacked the confidence to go for it. Today at Victoria Park was the first time I got a nice outside edge with both feet. Today it really clicked and my skating style has changed since. It's far from perfect but I can already notice being more efficient on the longer stretches. This was filmed in the summer of 2012, just before my friend Pavel left London for California. It was only later I noticed that the GoPro Hero 2 had a deadpixel in the middle of most of the footage. Because Pavel had left the country, re-filming wasn't an option.
So thanks to GoPro I had to spend many extra hours editing out the white dot on the video footage. (GoPro did exchange my camera for a new one). |
Categories
All
"Any tips, reviews and advice are my own opinions and are not to be taken as professional view points. The information on this site is what has worked for me and is here for guidance only, but I hope you gain insight into the various activities I partake in." Jonathan Chen Archives
December 2019
|