skate journal: short leadville park in the cold wind (oct 15, 2020)
On the way home from my mom’s I stopped at the Leadville park. There was only one other dude there, but he had his wife and 3 kids and they managed to hog the park well. Like the wife would sit on a ledge to film him, the youngest kids would climb on something and then an older one would scooter or skate around. I thought they were nice at least, until the dude literally started trying whatever I was trying. That’s when I got annoyed. Well I guess I was already annoyed. I had felt good playing disk golf with my brother earlier in the morning, but as soon as I stepped out of the car to skate my right knee felt terrible. It’s that lovely arthritic pain that comes with wind and cold. Ugh. I had changed my setup on the road too. I swapped out the Thunder 151s for Venture 6.1s. Not necessarily by choice, but I wasn’t feeling the Thunders and I used some old 5.8 Ventures as completes for my brothers kids. The first few ollies felt so solid it was crazy the difference in pop. That didn’t equate to good skating though. I had a couple kickflips on the hump, noseslide and noseslide to fakie the bump to ledge, almost nose manual the curb. Was trying a line of ollie to fakie on a bank, halfcab noseslide the little ledge then crooks the bump to ledge. But I never got the crook. I may have settled for noseslide. The 6.1s felt very heavy. I tried to do switch 180 down the drop up top then ollie up, but couldn’t get the ollie up. This is when daddy hero came over and did halfcabs down it. I suggested he had to get the ollie up to make it count so of course he did that first try and looked at me confused that I couldn’t do it. Sorry dude I’m 20 years older and my arthritis has my knee all locked up. This session was one of those ‘maybe I don’t really like this park that much after all’ sessions. I rolled around aimlessly for awhile then got back on the road.
(setup 8.38 null plant life deck, jessup ultragrip, venture 6.1 stock bushings, 52mm bones stf 103a v1, all washers on the outside of the wheels, new balance numeric 288S maroon size 11.5, no insoles)
(pain level 5/10 arthritis sucks and takes away any confidence)