March 2020 Longskate

Some time ago, I promised myself that I'd start doing one long skate each month. By long skate I mean over ten mile ride. I know, the true long distance purists think 10 miles is a warm up, but ten miles is about an hour of skating and sometimes getting an hour to distance skate can be a stretch when you also want to progress as a freestyler, maybe run a few slalom cones, skate the occasional curb, ditch, or bank while managing your family life and career. 

What I've been doing lately is skate a few miles here and there during the week, but honestly I don't feel like I get anything out of it distance-wise unless I put in at least ten miles at a time. So, I'm making good on the promise to myself of 12 good 10 plus mile rides this year. I'll have to catch up on January and February when I have the chance. 

I'm pretty stoked on this Relive app. It links up to Endomondo and creates a video based on my tracked gps ride and the photos I take along the way. So, you'll see in this video two things of note:

1. I was about 1 mile into the skate when a deer ran into a tall chain link fence, broke it's neck, and died right in front of me. I, of course, stopped skating and tried to call the park ranger to help the deer (at the time it was still alive but writhing and convulsing in pain). The last thing on my mind when it first happened was, of course, that I was tracking my mileage and time. I just kept calling numbers I found online to try and get an actual person to speak with me. I never got through to anyone. I just kept going around the same loop of voice mails and number options to speak with sales and reservation departments. The deer died while I was trying to get a live human to speak to me. Some runners said they would go find a ranger toward the visitor's center. By that point, the deer being dead, I started skating again.

2. Gumballs! I don't know what other people call them, but you'll see a picture of a "gumball" or one of those round, prickly seed balls from the sweet gum tree on the video. They were everywhere on today's skate. They kept causing me to slow my roll to nearly stopping, and they took me out at one point. I hit the gumball and went flying off my board. I ran it out the best I could, but I did end up ninja rolling and getting a nicely scraped knee out of it.

Anyway, look for more monthly longskates and some posts about how my weight training and running have helped my long distance skating trips because twelve miles today felt like nothing. I think I could have skated thirty with no problem. Also, look for the blog to be very longboard-centric for awhile. I'm trying to adjust my freestyle skating to a longboard and work in some common longboard moves (more on that in another post).

I have been wondering, however, about my wheel choice for distance skating. I'm riding 80mm wheels, and I like them, but when you skate these urban paths that force you to stop and start quite a bit, I wonder if the huge wheel size isn't a detriment. The greenline has a lot of crosswalks that force you to stop and restart. A smaller wheel (68-75mm) might accelerate faster if you're having to stop every mile or two. Just a thought.