July 2009 newsletter

My skating news

I'm now taking payments for courses through bank transfers. When you book onto a course you will be given the option of paying in cash after the lessons, or in full via a bank transfer. It's important that you understand that the fee paid by bank transfer is non-refundable: I'll give you a credit note, which you must use within 3 months. The full terms & conditions go into specific details.

I'm also working on putting together an introductory slalom course, which will be another group course. I've got the basic course plan done, with the skills that'll be taught, and had some feedback from Naomi Grigg; all I need to do now is write the notes for the students area and shoot a couple of videos. Soon as that's done I'll schedule it, so keep visiting my website or subscribe to the RSS feed.

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-06	30-Aug-2009 14:00-15:30, 05-Sep-2009 14:00-15:30, 06-Sep-2009 14:00-15:30

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

Backwards

This 3 lesson course, costing just £30, will get you skating backwards, including stopping and turning so that you are safe.

Booking ID	Dates
C-B-03	12-Sep-2009 14:00-15:30, 19-Sep-2009 11:30-13:00, 20-Sep-2009 11:30-13:00

You can find more information, and book onto any run of this course, by visiting the Backwards 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-06	29-Aug-2009 11:00-12:30, 29-Aug-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

Skate London

Not to be confused with the regular Wednesday night street skate, Skate London is a skate competition being held in London. Not only is there the usual slalom competition, but this year slides, high jump, hockey and bladercross are also featured. Some of the worlds best slalomers will be there, as well as many of the familiar London skaters; it sounds like it's turning into quite an international event!

I've registered for the slalom competition, completely aware that I'm going to get knocked out in the first round, so come along and watch me make a complete fool of myself! I'm also debating having a go at the bladecross event, just for a bit of a laugh.

Goodwood Roller Marathon

The Camberley Skaters are, once again, organising the Goodwood Roller Marathon: a family friendly skate marathon run to raise money for the NSPCC. If you've never done a marathon on inlines before then this is a good event to start with and you get to go round the historic Goodwood racing circuit (one for the petrol heads there!). It's taking place on Sunday 9th August and registration is open on their website.

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.

The Invisible Skater

Here's a quirky video for Print Brigade T-shirts:

Frame alignment issues

You know how, when you buy a car, all you see on the roads are the same make? Well I wrote an article recently on frame alignment on inline skates and, since then, several articles have come to my attention on issues surrounding alignment! They're part of a sequence written by Miguel Jose on Inline Planet: the first one deals with one technique for aligning your frames, and the second is about fine tuning that setup to deal with common skating problems. They're worth a read.

My article on frame alignment discussed it in relation to weak ankles, which is something that can be solved by doing exercises (on skates I'd suggest swizzles). Interestingly an article appeared on the NY Times website about ankle injuries suggesting that balancing on one-foot can improve your ankle muscles, particularly when in recovery. I know that some skating instructors and coaches suggest doing this, and it's probably something I could certainly do more of.

Greg Mirzoyan

Here's a beautifully shot video by Greg Mirzoyan, who happens to be one of my favourite freeride skaters and his blog is chock-full of great photos and videos:

Other instructors

Mike van Erp is runnning his Speed and Fitness course, starting Thursday 13th August. It's an excellent course, which I've done twice before, that helps you understand how to skate more efficiently. A video review of your skating is part of the course, which is not only entertaining to watch yourself, but also extremely informative. You can book on this course through the groups courses page on Mike's site.

If you've got kids, and they're up on a Saturday morning, then you might have heard of Skate Nation. It's a CBBC TV show that follows the (by now all too) familiar format of shows like Strictly Come Dancing but the stars of this show are skating kids. One of the judges for the show was Asha Kirkby, who's soon to be celebrating a pretty important skating milestone (a few years on skates, but I'll leave the number out!) and an instructor I try hard to emulate. The show's worth a watch and you can read some behind the scenes thoughts on Asha's blog.