Shins

Back in the heyday of freestyle most skaters wore shin guards, as jumping about while a rapidly flipping board is spinning a foot above the ground beneath you is a recipe for some bruises and scrapes. I too wore shin guards for long practice sessions, simply because it helped me avoid pain and let me keep on practicing after a few failed tricks. I stopped wearing shin guards when I decided I didn't need them, and I came back into skating this week assuming that they were unnecessary. I am starting to change my mind.

I've been skating each night for the last week for about 45 minutes each session, and though I've smacked my shins a few times on several occasions its only been the last couple of nights that I've really begun to suffer.

Last night I was practicing shoveits and trying to figure out kick-flips again. That should be enough to tell you that I went home with some bruises. (Though at least I have 180 shoveits and pop-shoveits OK, and believe that 360s are not too far away).

This afternoon I spent half an hour at the local public skate park just watching the kids tear it up. I'm planning on trying the park soon myself, but I refuse to let myself go until I have all my basics back under control. From watching the kids today I recognized that I would really want to take advantage of slides and grinds at the park--in fact thats all the most of the kids were trying today.

So tonight I went back to my favorite parking lots and in addition to working on kick-flips some more (...I don't remember this trick being so hard...) I spent some time on some 8" painted curbs. Didn't take me long to feel out backside 50-50s and tailslides, though I by no means mastered them on the backside at least I was doing alright, though when I switched to frontside I failed miserably. After exasperating myself trying to get these down, I finally just went back to backside to end the evening. Well I was getting some nice smacks and short slides on tailslides and was having fun when all of a sudden, bam--I ollie too high and smack the tail down really hard to compensate and not miss the curb. But my front foots already too high itself, and the board strikes the curb, pops back up (and somehow towards my body), thrashing a lovely scrape all the way up my right shin. Curses. Time to lay on the grass and look at the clouds.

5 minutes later I'm thinking shin guards, at least for the time being, might be a good idea again. The pain had brought me to the grass, sure, but I'm pretty tolerant of pain and its typical for me to get back on the horse as fast as I can (if only to get my mind off the pain at hand).

But I also learned something in martial arts some years back that I've found to be true: even if you can take the pain, your body can become unconsciously wired to fear repetition of that pain, so much so that your body might resist your will when told to do something that might risk another instance of the same pain. When practicing and trying new stuff, its always better to go in padded and keep your body open to the new moves it needs to learn, rather than to fight the pain over and over and risk letting your body dictate what it will and won't do.