Category: Pandemic Skating

Posts about skateboarding I posted during the pandemic

Parking Lot Hijinx

Took the Mode Pool board, which I’ve decided is a little better for my weird freestyle influenced version of street skating, to my oldest skate spot and just let the GoPro record a bunch of stuff. Not crazy about the fisheye effect and the way it makes distant stuff look even more distant, but it gets the job done. After about an hour the school district cop rolled up and told me the entire grounds of the school are closed, so I saluted and said very good sir, and was on my way. I’d gotten my skate in, and really, I’m not gonna win that argument. I mean, there I am in an otherwise empty parking lot, but how can she tell all the dumbasses on the playground to leave and not tell me the same thing? Well, she can’t. So off I went.

By the way – for hard wheel skating, there’s just no reason to buy anything but Bones STF.

Nothing mind boggling here – just sharing ’cause that’s how we pandemic.

Looks pretty good if you go to full screen on the vid.

Parking Lot Hijinx from Bob Loftin on Vimeo.

“Street Skating”

I’ve been trying to get out and roll around about an hour a day. Usually from 7pm – 8pm. Earlier and the sun is in my eyes.

I’m not really doing anything hard. As long as I get some rolling in, and I’m used to the feel of my board, I’m good. Nothing serious. Just riding a street board with somewhat turny trucks. The looseness of the truck doesn’t make footwork easy, but I like being able to carve a nice arc when I’d skating like this.

One thing I don’t enjoy in my typical freestyle is that I think the necessary tightness of the trucks (and I don’t even ride them as tight as a lot of FSers do) destroys a lot of my fluidity and looseness. And those are two traits of my own skating that I think are OK. I’m not great at technical stuff, and I’m not a huge risk-taking badass. Of all the stuff I do in this little video, my favorite thing is the little arc I carve after that first line, as I’m passing by the camera. I really need to slowly loosen up my FS trucks a bit so I can get that same effect.

Video from Bob Loftin on Vimeo.

G-Snap

So I was out “street skating” tonight. New board tonight. I like it. Anyway, I notice this particular little thing I do. And when I say “noticed”, I mean I’ve been doing this forever, but never really thought about what is going on. It’s such a little move, but it has a nice feel to it. Lots of directional changes.

Anyway, I slowed it down in this video.

Anyway, rolling forward, I set up like I’m going to do a g-turn, and you can actually see that the front trucks does make a very quick little arc, rather than just being an endover. That’s why I like doing this, I realized, because it sets up some physics where you kind of “sling” yourself out of it. Not saying it’s awesome, but it is a fun thing to me.

G-Snap from Bob Loftin on Vimeo.

Plans go sideways

My plans for bank skating were ruined yesterday when I got to the little ditch I’ve been skating for 41 years. There was water running from one of the alleys that run on either side running into the ditch. This has never happened before.

This was my first trip to the ditch since they rebuilt the alleys last year. The edge of the alley has been rounded and lowered a bit, so that water now flows right into the ditch, rather than into the street. I suspect that during the summer, given the Texas proclivity for washing cars and watering lawns, it will be very hard to find the ditch dry from here on out.

I must admit that this very much soured my mood.

But that’s life as a skateboarder. Spots come and go. Even long running spots like this one eventually get ruined or outright destroyed. The skateboarder’s mind must be adaptable, and it is.

Here’s a goofy thing I made after leaving the ditch. I didn’t really skate well after the mental assault of my ditch being messed up, but whatever. The mission goes on.

‘Cause I got my own world to live through and uh
And I ain’t gonna copy you

If 6 was 9 from Bob Loftin on Vimeo.