Attempting to Land Kickflips, Skateboarding at 50

Skateboarding at 50.

On May 10th 2020 I turned 50 years old. While younger me never imagined I'd still be skating at 50, I have always said, Tony Hawk (one of the world's best skaters from my generation) is only two years older than me. When he decides to quit that gives me two more years before maybe I'll consider it. He hasn't quit yet.

While I'm not nearly as good as him I still enjoy being on a skateboard, and working on getting back to a level of ability that I had back in my twenties. That said, kickflips were not my forte, even in my twenties.

I reckon I could count on one hand, and still have a finger or two left over, the number of flat ground kickflips I landed. I actually had a greater chance of landing a backside kickflip to tail on a curb than I had of landing a standard kickflip, but even then that wasn't in any way consistent.

So in early March, while the world was in lock down from the pandemic, I thought that would be a good time to attempt to learn kickflips, and land one by my fiftieth birthday. To that effect I made a video stating my goal and also trying some new ideas to try and get me a little closer to landing.

As it turns out attempting to land my kickflips with the back foot only on the board was the most progression I've made in years with regard to learning the trick.

After this video I didn't do a lot in the way of filming my skateboarding, or even skating any more than usual. It wasn't long before my birthday started looming. The day before I got out my camera and skateboard to see if I could give one really big push to land a kickflip by my birthday. I also took the opportunity to run through my Braille Skateboarding Made Simple (Volume 1) tricks, and to update you with what happened with my entry into Revive's Design a Lifeline Competition.

If you're interested in getting a better look at my revised Pizza Monkey Lifeline Skateboard graphic you can view it in my etourist skateboards store.

Watching the video you'll see I didn't manage to land kickflips by my birthday. However, two days later I got out on my board with a camera again and did nothing but kickflips.

This video is quite definitely the closest yet I've come to landing a kickflip, getting both feet on the board several times. I don't personally count these as lands but I do call it progress.

At the time of writing this article I still haven't landed kickflips but I am still working at it. It would be a shame to get this close and then give up.

One of the few flat ground kickflips I landed back in my twenties was actually caught on video. It was only memorable because I recorded over it due to it being on one of the few Video8 cassette tapes I had for my camera at the time. It would be good to actually have one recorded on video again.

I'll keep you posted.

Comments

I'm Confused About Why People Prefer to Say Discombobulated?

D iscombobulated. Is a word that I think someone rediscovered about three or four years ago (maybe more because the pandemic years have thrown out my sense of time) and now I hear it a lot. It's not a new word by any means, but when I started hearing multiple celebrities using it in everyday sentences, I actively had to look up what it meant. Define it with as many synonyms as you like but essentially it's just another word meaning 'confused'. Seinfeld Quotes: Quotes.net The words are pretty much interchangeable. He was discombobulated by too many choices. He was confused by too many choices. My confusion is the length of the word. It's unnecessarily long with too many syllables. There are many other words that mean confused, and therefore also mean discombobulated. Most of them are shorter and easier to say. So why not just say 'confused'? Perhaps discombobulated sounds more intelligent, maybe? Hawaii Five-0 Quotes: Quotes.net I've noticed it gets us...

Social Media: It's All Fake News - Even That News You Shared, That Proves the Thing, Because It's Backed Up By a Credible Expert, is Fake.

Social Media profiles need a peer based rating system that locks you out for 30 days if your feed is one long stream of depressing boredom that bums everyone out. I don't watch or read the news anymore (mainstream or otherwise). From time to time, if something filters through that piques my interest, I'll take a bit of a dive to find out more. The recent US election is a good example. I even wrote a few opinion pieces in this blog. The Daily Show Is Not News Note that I don't count The Daily Show as news, because I did watch quite a lot of that during the US election. While they lean quite a bit toward the left overall, it's not a show you look to for context, since much of their humor is based on reframing context to get a laugh. The one thing The Daily Show does well is highlight how both Liberal and Right wing media latch onto one or two bullet point messages each day and run them through the mouths of every on screen commentator like they're all wind up parro...

TV Series Review: The Penguin (2024) No Spoilers

W hile we wait for an eternity (well an eternity in movie fan years anyway) for The Batman Part 2 , sequel to Matt Reeves acclaimed, The Batman (2022), we have, what is essentially a direct sequel with The Penguin , a limited. eight episode, TV Series set within a week or two of the end of the first film. Unfortunately it's a direct sequel to Colin Farrell's Penguin rather than Robert Pattinson's, Bruce Wayne/Batman. Fortunately that's the only real disappointment I have with this series. Right from the first episode The Penguin establishes itself as a show for grown ups who enjoy actual character development, that hooks you in, is thought provoking, and raises questions that you expect will be answered as the story unfolds. After the events of The Batman, there is something of a power vacuum left in Gotham's crime world that Oswald 'Oz' Cobb a.k.a. The Penguin, sets out to fill using his experience, quick thinking, and his ability to hustle his way into...

Movie Review: The Fall Guy (2024) Minor Spoilers

W hen I initially heard they were making a movie version of the TV series, The Fall Guy (1981-86) , I was definitely interested, as a person who tuned in to that series, weekly, when it originally aired. I had intended to see The Fall Guy in the cinema but, for whatever reason, didn't get there, and didn't prioritize seeing the film as the reviews, and more importantly, general information about the movie came out. Specifically, The Fall Guy makes no effort to capture whatever magic it was the TV show had that made it the show it was. A fact that is driven home by the reworked TV series theme song, played over the end credits and behind the scenes footage of stunts in the film, that removes all references to real world actors and replaces iconic line of "I'm the unknown stuntman who made Redford such a star" with the nonsensical "I'm the unknown stuntman who tries to win your heart." - sure... I guess... I mean, the original song is about never gett...

Movie Review: Memory (2023)

S omething a little different for me in terms of movies I usually review, Memory is a film I was invited along to see by my partner, and both of us didn't know much about the movie going in, other than it was a film where one of the leads has dementia. The basic premise follows adult, special needs social worker, Sylvia (Jessica Chastain), who leads a simple and structured life. When Saul (Peter Sarsgaard) follows her home from their high school reunion the surprise encounter profoundly impacts both of their lives. The film starts out very awkward and disjointed to some degree, which I feel is intentional, to reflect that Sylvia, who is also a struggling single mother, is fairly resilient, she is, in many ways, just barely holding everything together because she doesn't have any other option. When Saul sees Sylvia at their high school reunion it seems like some unpleasant memories from her past are fast tracked into the forefront of her life, and things move forward fro...

Boom Crash Opera Born Classic But Not Again

Boom Crash Opera are an Australian Band that reached the peak of their popularity in the mid to late nineteen eighties. They are a band that I knew about at that time but was never really excited by until they released their ill fated double album Born and Born Again in 1995 (Album cover pictured). At the time of its release I was very much into emerging Australian musical acts and was also looking out for new sounds that were different and had kind of a futuristic/electronic sound. Artists that I was buying at the time included; Swoop , Nine Inch Nails and Pop Will Eat Its Self . As well as a really interesting release by David Bowie, the concept album, Outside . Born was a fairly radical departure for Boom Crash Opera (BCO). The first single, Gimme , was often compared to the sounds of Gary Glitter, particularly his single, Rock n Roll part 2 , because of the pounding drum loops. Watch the video below. My favorite single from the album is dissemble which probably went now...

Movie Opinion: Love Actually (2003) Actually has Aged Just As It Should

S creen Rant ran an article by Bisma Fida , Love Actually: The 8 Storylines That Aged Badly, Ranked (Published Dec 10, 2021), which obviously was regurgitated into one of my newsfeeds because Love Actually (2003) is still one of the best Christmas movies ever made, that's why it's still topical in 2024. Bisma, who completely failed to get their profile page pro-nouns in order. Something that should be a priority for anyone commenting on what is accepted by modern audiences, who are all completely comfortable accepting preferred pro-nouns without question, because we're just that enlightened in 2024. F**K Screen Rant Full disclosure, I hate Screen Rant to the point that, if I do click on their click bait titles because I didn't see it was a Screen Rant story, I'll close the browser window almost immediately once I see what it is (which is why I'm not providing any links to their homepage). It's not because I dislike their articles. I would actually like to...

TET.Life (The Extraordinary Tourist Life)

Search This Blog