Slowing Down

​It seems I'm in a phase of revisiting old posts. This week I'm thinking about an old post I wrote called, "​The Freestyle Attitude." It is one of my most popular posts, and the message is one that I've had to remind myself about this week.

Although you should go read the post, to sum it up in a sentence: If you don't have a trick locked in, you don't have the trick.

For instance, I've been able to do caspers for over a year. It was one of the first things I "learned." The thing is, I never actually got them. I could land them enough to get one on camera for an Instagram clip, but I didn't have them consistent enough to put them in my World Round Up run. By my own admission, they weren't truly mine. See, I didn't really understand the movements of my body necessary to get them consistent. In fact, they'd been frustrating me for over a year, and I'd often wondered what was wrong with me that I had to relearn them over and over.

This week they clicked. I watched Tony Gale's trick tip again, and it struck me. It wasn't what Tony said, it was watching him do them.

I have been skating for over thirty years. I was a kid in the early 80s that cruised around on a department store board. Later I learned to ollie and street skating became everything to me. After that it was pretending to be a vert skater on a mini ramp. Then it was longboards, park skating, ditch skating, and slalom before settling into distance and freestyle. In all of that skating, I've always kept my feet either firmly planted on the bolts, or I've landed firmly on the bolts. Landing with one leg straight (and in the air) while the other leg bent (and I stood on it) was not a thing. It is not in my muscle memory.

​It struck me that because it was unnatural for me to land that way, I needed to get the muscle memory established. I needed to remind myself before every casper, "Stretch the left leg. Stand on the right with knee bent," because I was going back to land bolts mentality each time I tried to add a casper into a line of tricks. You'll even see in the casper clip, I tap my leg as I'm reminding myself of how to land. After a week of reminding myself, I am able to add caspers into lines because I stopped, slowed down, thought about things, and really got the movement down.

Because of that success, I decided to spend a couple weeks slowed down, making sure that all of my tricks really are mine.

I hope you all had a great week, and remember with caspers: Foot down doesn't count!!!