30 Days In

Today will mark my 30th day in a row to skate. Some days have been very brief lines of a trick or two (my wedding anniversary, for instance). Other days have been full sessions at a skatepark.

The other instagram based project I am doing is related to physical fitness. Fitness is something most of you that visit this blog know I'm very interested in. In addition to my chronicling a skate every single day, I'm doing a short clip of an exercise every single day this year. The exercises are a mixed bag of stretches, resistance bands, weights (coming soon), and mobility. 

Sharing 365 different exercises got me thinking about how many different skate tricks I could share in a year. There are so many different tricks I've spend time on over the years that I forget about. I thought it would be fun to take reach into the bag and take some of those out again. I mean, I really enjoy doing things like walk the cows and I challenged myself with backwards walk the dogs for so long, but I rarely ever do them. Plus, I need to keep learning new tricks, and I can use this as an additional inspiration to learn new things.

As far as skating goes, I'm continuing to ride my 8.0 board as a daily rider. In fact, I have a new 8" Paige (board maker based in Arkansas) due to come in later today. I took the skids off my Ishod Wair deck and it has worn out incredibly quickly from doing freestyle trick on it. I'm going back to skid plates. I took them off for ollie and tail slide purposes, but in truth I don't ollie much and do tail slides even less.

I recently started coining myself as a "low skater." By that I meant I stay low to the ground on my board. It was an off the cuff remark, but it fits. I don't have the desire to drop in from above 4 or 5 feet. I don't have the desire to fly down a flight of stairs. I want to challenge myself with freestyle footwork and flat ground skating and hit a few curbs here and there. I want to do some wheelies and maybe work up to a few manuals. I want to push myself but I understand that pushing myself at nearly 50 is very different from pushing myself at 15, 25, or even 35.  But it doesn't mean I can't continue to push. It just means pushing in a different way.