Shaun Gregoire

Jordan Sanchez

Both are awesome, fun, creative and motivating.

My legs have felt like total crap the last few days. I worked hard all day to rid the arthritic/tendonitis pain (I think the tendonitis pain is a symptom of my arthritis and the arthritis was acting up due to a big change in weather coming (snow! shit!)). Lots of turmeric (which gives me the shits), ibuprofen, walking lightly, wore my tendonitis knee brace, iced my knees twice, etc. Towards the end of the day at work it seemed to pay off. I went to some stairs and jumped up/down and my legs felt pretty good. Whew. After dinner I took a nap since I’ve been feeling pretty run down lately. Man, how old am I sounding here? Drugs for arthritis, naps, got a little sore throat, ha ha. One of my complaints about street skating is that it’s hard on my legs because ollies out of the gates hurt. I need to carve around to get my legs going these days. Well what do you know, I have a ramp in my garage, maybe I should use it! So I did. I sucked it up though. Seriously slammed on an axle stall. I guess last time I skated it my bearings were still the crappy old ones so maybe that’s my excuse. I ended up not really landing anything, but lots of falling is probably about as good of a warm up for street skating as there is. So I left for downtown, where I haven’t skated in forever. I started out in some random parking lot with some funny plastic speed bumps about 20 feet apart and banked curbs. I wallied one to manual to wallie the next. Stoked me out even though they are only a few inches tall. Also did a few weak ollies on the banks. Moved on. After some boardslides on a parking block I ended up here.

This area has more then you see in the photo. Before I put the box there I tried a few lines. Coming from the back of the photo I would ride down the handicap ramp, manual the pad in the photo, noseslide the flat bar against the wall then tried back 180 nose manual on the little median a bunch of times until somehow the stars aligned right and I managed a nice slow back 180 pivoted on the front wheels without the back wheels touching at all (how’s that for a run on sentence?). Pretty hyped on that. Going the other way I would do front 180 nose manual on the median and tries switch front 180 manual on the yellow pad in the photo. I got close to the sw one, but not quite. I was about to move on, but saw the box in a dumpster and wanted to ollie over it. It took me a few tries as I was kind of timid on my old fragile legs (ha ha), but when I got it I had a fun ride down the hill you cant really see in the photo with a long powerslide that scared the crap out of some janitors emptying trash into a dumpster. I was feeling really tired at this point and didn’t want to push things too much. So I just kind of walked/skated around for a bit looking at spots. I was kind of bummed on how many spots aren’t lit anymore. I did a fakie pivot fakie on the wells fargo mini qp then rolled off down the parking lot doing a few 180s. Seems like a good place to do somewhat downhill flatground some other time. As I pushed back towards the car I managed a bunch of ollies up/off curbs that hyped me up since I was going a little faster then normal. I ended it with an ollie up a curb and ollie down a little 3 stair that I didn’t look at first. Pretty lame on paper, but fun at the time. I’m pretty glad I went skating even though I was pretty timid/tired. Street skating is so much more rewarding then park skating to me. I can’t believe how much I rambled on about a short little one hour solo session. Sorry.