What a day. My knee hurt really bad all day. I went to work for half a day then took the bus to DIA, flew to St Louis then took a light rail to downtown near where I was staying. The train ride was horrible. Some young punk yelling at white people and dropping the N bomb and pointing at me. Yippee. I got off at my stop and walked up the stairs into a city I know almost nothing about. I walked about 20 feet trying to figure out which way to go then dropped the board down and started pushing. I immediately felt awesome. I didn’t push it as I had a laptop on my back and all, but I quickly felt great. I went to my hotel, checked in, dropped my stuff then hit the city. It’s one of those weird cities where the downtown area vacates at nights. It was pretty weird, but I found spot after spot after spot. Directly across the street from the hotel is a marble ledge off a nine stair if anyone wants to get buck. It’s waxed even! I wanted to take it easy on my knee so I mostly just cruised, doing ollies up, off curbs. So fun. I went by the baseball stadium. There was a ledge there, but I wasn’t ready for it. Some more fun cruising ollie’ing manholes and I ended up at the AT&T building that I’m supposed to help install some software. It’s got a sick marble ledge which caused me to break my streak of 20+ ollies without a bail. I went around the building thinking it was a big bust and came back and just ollied onto it and 180’d off. There are no marks on this ledge. WTF St Louis? It’s perfect. The next building over had lots of marble too. I did a little front nose to fakie, noseslide and crooks all first t. Moved on. I ended up at the 2 up, 3 up, 4 down I wanted to find really bad. So stoked! I didn’t get up the 3 first try and by the time I grabbed my board to turn around security was there to say no more. Doh. Ended up at some other stadium that had a long brick section with a sick low granite ledge. I skated that for a minute and had a blast. Just did some crooks and front 50s, but just cruising and doing some back 180s, sw 180s, kickflips. So fun. I rolled around the area seeing lots of other fun spots, but started to get weirded out in an area that looked sketchy. I managed maybe my best wallride on a jersey barrier ever though. I started to get pretty tired and my knee was finally hurting a little so I decided not to push it. I found the 2 up 3 up 4 down and tried it again real quick but slammed on the 3 up again. Ha. I left to get some food and cruised back to the hotel. Turns out there is a super super sick marble ledge on the one side of my apartment I didn’t look at before. Wow. No marks on it either though. Weird.

Met up with Bernie, Sam, Garret, Max, Jack, Dean, Sean and I think that’s it. We went to some spots where I did some filming. Some not so easy, others really easy like above. Gotta love when there is a chair at a spot nearby. So awesome. The only not awesome part of that spot was watching Lester (Dean’s dog) fall off the loading dock. Ouch! Then we went to Crestview where I kind of skated. Got a boardslide popout, but started to feel some pretty good knee pain so I went to filmer mode again as Max wanted a couple lines. After filming Dean, Jack, Max and I kind of skated for awhile. Jack did some really cool slow tricks on the curb. Back big fakie 5-0. Some other stuff which was fun too. I kickflipped up the little two a couple times, but that was about it. Then we went to get a Gillinghammer for Nullozine. A crook on a flatbar against a wall. I got it, but it was horrible and didn’t feel very good at all. I think my leg/knee was beat and I couldn’t get a good ollie. Pretty fun day. Yet again at the end of the day though I can’t help but wonder if I should get my knee checked out. Sure it didn’t have intense pain this time, but it didn’t feel very good either.

Oh yeah I had some new shoes on. Ipath Derelict. The eS shoes weren’t dead, but I couldn’t wear maroon shirts at work in St Louis and I didn’t want to pack more than one pair of shoes. These shoes are awesome.

Met up with Dean after a long saturday of trying to get stuff done, but failing. We met at Valmont. My knee felt pretty good and I was able to ollie up curbs without pain. I went nuts, just ollieing like crazy, trying manuals, etc. About 10 minutes of that and boom, intense pain in the knee. Ugh. Pushing doesn’t hurt it so i just cruised around while Dean did some manuals. Then he went over to the ledge so I folled. Ollies still hurt (bad) so I just did switch flip attempts over and over and over. Some were close. None hurt. After awhile I noticed that my knee was feeling better so I skated “for real” for a bit. I got a line of crooked jib grind, 360 flip 5 point landing (4 wheels and one hand). I did a few front tails without much slide and a front 5-0 shove out. Dean almost got a sick line of fakie ollie off the early part of the kicker then quick into frontside halfcab to front noseslide. Get that Dean! Happy I was able to skate after an hour of pain, but I’m wondering if I’m doing more damage then good.