Entries this day: skate_ramp_birraporettis_wall

skate ramp birraporettis wall

2 June 1994

(above date is an educated guess)

Dude.

Last Thursday I went skating again- my ankle was kinda messed up, but not from skating. I don't know what was wrong with it, but it *really* hurt by the end of the night.

A guy had a small ramp set up out by Party on the Plaza. This was super cool. It was designed to convert all your speed into upward momentum. :) The actual ramp part of the ramp was concave, and it bowed slightly when you hit it. The board's bowing action, along with bending your knees slightly, allowed us to jump essentially straight up about 4 to 6 feet. The first couple of times that I tried it, I stayed cautious, and landed safely. I tried it a bit faster, and went a bit higher, and ended up sliding on my wrist/palm pads and the toes of my skates. (Onlookers said that I used my pads very well) I kept it conservative again and just got the feeling of how to use the ramp correctly. Then I went for a big jump and *almost* ate it pretty bad. Luckily, I used my pads correctly again... I jumped a few last times and my last big jump went well. They said I got about 5 feet of air, and I landed properly. Cool.

We also skated down a garage I had never skated before. It's called Biraporetti's (sp) because that is the name of the establishment at the bottom of the building. The garage is 13 stories tall, so it gave us a lot of time to play on the way down. I practiced high-speed, tight-radius turns, and only slid sideways once. On one turn I *barely* squeaked past a parked truck; My right skate went under its back bumper as I flew by. We got to the bottom, and I skated under the ticket booth arm thing, and then noticed that we were locked in the garage. !! The actual exit for the garage is blocked by a steel door that opens only for cars. So we waited for a couple minutes until a car came down and let us out.

The last crazy thing I did was skate off a wall. Okay- imagine a building with a flat, level foundation, but with a non-level sidewalk surrounding it.

So the foundation starts at one end of the block about 1 foot above the sidewalk. At the other end of the block, it's a bit higher. I hopped up onto the one foot tall side and skated along the foundation. I figured it would be no problem; I had skated off this wall before. ( I just hadn't skated off the very *highest* point of the wall.) So as I was approaching the end of the wall, I got that gosh-dangit-this-is-higher-than-I-expected feeling as I saw how high I actually was. Now, due to the nature of how one lands while wearing roller blades, one doesn't have the option to stop, reconsider, start again, then jump. You'd be all off balance and it would be just crazy. Plus, there were people watching, and I was wearing my NO FEAR t-shirt. So I watched as the sidewalk kept getting farther and farther away ...oh shit... and I got to the edge and dropped off. I landed straight down on my skates as I wanted to, but I got a literally sinking feeling in my whole guts and everything and I continued to fall forward and kinda ka-klunked onto the sidewalk. My breath was knocked out for a second, but I was able to get back up and continue skating.

I haven't gone back to see exactly how high that wall is, but it is definitely taller than me. My guess is that it's between 6 and 7 feet.

After telling this story to a few people, I have made a realization that just because I'm wearing skates, doesn't mean that when I land, I'm automatically landing on pillows or anything. There's still all that mass smushing down on my feet and there's that momentum to ka-klunk me on the sidewalk.

I took physics, and I'm finally finding an application for it.