I went skating tonight, for the first time in .. several years? As I expected, I was not as good as I was when I skated for a few hours every day. Surprisingly, my Mighty Human Brain totally remembered without any hassle what motions to make, how to balance, etc – I was in zero danger of falling over at any time. So that’s a good thing. However, as I also suspected, the small muscles in my feet used for delicate balance control (which are pretty much not used for anything except skating) were FECKIN’ SORE after about two minutes of skating about the underground parking lot of my building. So clearly, they’ll have to be built back up into shape.
The basement parking lot is REALLY great for skating. Big and flat, with ramps and bumps to jump, levels B4 and B5 are pretty much deserted in the evenings – it’s really quite perfect.
I managed to skate about for 45 minutes or so, before the pain my feet forced me to stop. To a lesser extent, my lower back was also sore – skating has some legs-pushing-slightly sideways stuff going on which uses that muscle group, but I’d forgotten all about that.
All in all, it went much better than I thought. If I do it each evening for an hour or so, I should be into shape enough to try skating to work one day. I may skate every day downstairs, then try a trial skate to work and back next weekend, to see how long it takes.
Oh yeah, also, one thing that I REALLY wish I had back in The Day was an ipod. Ipods make skating double-the-fun! [1] Oonst beats and EBM are, I feel, the right music for skating. Anything with an agressive bass beat, really. That’ll be why Roller Discos were so popular. Anyone want to throw a one-off roller disco here in Auckland?
[1] Note to Apple: Next ipod firmware release – can the ipod PLEASE have at LEAST a simple crossfader option for track transitions? itunes has it. Now please make the ipod have it.
Additional Note to Apple: Also, can you give some thought to a DJ-specific firmware release for the ipod? Maybe that .. say .. doesn’t have all the games and notes and shit, and that (if there’s enough CPU) does have some simple DJ functions like (in order of importance) (a) a crossfader, (b) a pitch bender, (c) scratching via the scroll wheel, (d) maybe a BPM counter, with a bass threshold trigger adjust. KTHXBAI.