February 2009 newsletter

My skating news

I've written two How To articles that may be of interest to newer skaters: bearing cleaning and wheel rotation. Both of these should be part of your regular skate maintenance routine.

Coming up this month my 1-day skater course is taking place on Saturday February 14th, Valentine's Day. You'll get to learn everything needed to get going in inline skating and, for this run of the course, if you and your partner (or friend) book then one of you goes free.

Courses Coming Up

Here are a few courses that I'm going to be running in the next few months. Each one of these courses gives you access to the students area, which is like your own personal skating manual.

Sunday Stroll

This is a 3 lesson course, costing just £30, that will give you everything you need to cope with the Sunday Stroll, or just to get you skating well.

Booking ID	Dates
C-SS-01	07-Mar-2009 14:00-15:30, 08-Mar-2009 15:00-16:30, 15-Mar-2009 14:00-15:30

You can find more information, and book onto any run of this course, by visiting the Sunday Stroll page.

1-Day Skater

Finding timing in the 21st Century to make courses that happen over multiple weeks can be hard! So this course happens on one day, costs just £20, and will get you skating in no time.

Booking ID	Dates
1DS-01	14-Feb-2009 11:00-12:30, 14-Feb-2009 13:30-15:00

You can find more information, and book onto any run of this course, by visiting the 1-Day Skater page.

Skating Events

Le Mans 24 Hour

Everyone has probably heard of the Le Mans 24 Hour endurance race for cars but they also do a version for skaters. This year the Le Mans 24 Hour Roller is taking place on the weekend of 27-28 June. Typically people form teams so that they only skate, maybe, 2-3 hours each but you can do it as a duo or, if you're supremely confident (or slightly insane), you can do it solo.

If you're looking for a team to join there's usually a discussion on Serpentine Road.

London to Brighton

Keeping up the theme of going a long way on your skates: the annual British Heart Foundation London to Brighton bike ride is happening on the Sunday 21st June and, as has happened for the last few years, skaters are going to go. It's 54 miles, has some pretty rough surfaces, involves dodging one-day-a-year cyclists, and has some very scary downhills (I won't mention the uphills!). Not trying to put you off at all, but this is a serious challenge for any skater.

If you want to have a go at this then you really need to start practicing now. You're going to be spending about 6-8 hours skating and your technique is going to play a big part, along with your fitness too. Although the roads will be closed to traffic you're going to be experiencing surfaces that are rough, even by London standards, so getting out on a few London Friday Night Skate will help get you ready.

Stuff seen on the WWW

I've been wandering around the WWW looking for interesting skating articles and videos; so here's the best I've seen in recent weeks. Note that I am not responsible for the content of external third party websites or videos; some music and commentary found in such videos may contain language of an offensive nature.

If you have seen anything you think is interesting, contact me and I'll consider putting it into future newsletters.

138

People used to say that Sebastien Laffargue (of Seba skates fame) had the "perfect heel": here's a guy that can slalom through 121 cones on a single heel wheel. Seems that the new boy wonder is Igor Cheremetieff as he's just gone and done 138! Over 100 metres weaving side-to-side on the heel wheel of one skate for a world record. Good things these two are friends!

Slides at the WSC

I wrote a post on the World Slalom Championships but I didn't mention that there was also a slides competition run too. Slides are caused by the blades of your skates being at extreme angles and perpendicular to your direction of travel. Not only can they be an extremely useful way of stopping, they can also look really impressive, as the video below shows.