this section was shot between 98 and 2000 if i remember right. a lot of it seems to be in the winter. we used to skate in -10 celcius often and sometimes even -20. through all the years, we mostly filmed in the late fall or winter because we were too busy having fun skating to pull out a camera in the summer! winter would come on quickly and wed try to make some videos before it was too late and six months of snow hit. all the snowy tricks and actually most of my tricks from these old sections are from a handful of roadtrips to towns called medicine hat and swift current. there are only two regina spots in this whole edit: the flat rail at arcola school with all the switchups and the wall drop-in near the end, not exactly a session spot. this was the first time i ever tried classic thrones. they had metal plates under the liner, no heel pads. quite a change from the cushions in salomons! i had actually started skating salomons early, before they came out. in the very beginning, after a couple years of doing tricks in my old hockey and rec blades, i bought oxygen argons. at my first contest i won a pair of roces m12s, immediately becoming the happiest boy in the world. when they wore out i bought a pair of 5th elements and before i had even skated them a week i was called by the local salomon rep and hooked up with a sponsorship! again, the happiest boy in the world. and ive been blessed with free skates ever since! a couple years later the salomon rep had become a ghost, not returning calls, etc. and so i ended up skating my friend dan varins thrones for a while before being sponsored by salomon again at the national level. the first impression i had from thrones was that they made tech tricks way easier. suddenly i was really good at torques and all sorts of tricks that used to be tough to do. at that time i had only seen a couple people torquing more than ten stairs, (jordan dale, vinny minton, etc) so i was really juiced about the one in the snow. that rail was at hat high - the local high school in medicine hat, five hours drive from regina. they had a lot of good spots and mild winters so we used to go there a few times a year to stay with ian buchko. sometimes i would even take a 12hr bus overnight just to spend the weekend skating there. ian was really good at the time. years before this video was shot he had already done crazy tricks like negative misfit down the hat high rail. (fitting name as it was actually quite high, leaving people dangling all the time). as far as i remember this was one of the first online profiles ever and it was posted to be-mag. again, riley maruyama went hard with the editing and effects. the section basically opens with truespin kg on a kink rail. in those days i found true kgs pretty easy while everyone else thought they were the hardest trick ever. actually i guess i considered them to be one of the hardest at first and maybe thats why i put some effort into learning them. i used to be a big fan of billy prislin and he was a master of that trick. anyways i ended up learning how to do it quite safely, so would pull it out here and there to get a rise out of my friends! a few years before this i had broken my right ankle, so started to put more effort into learning switch (left foot) tricks. any time i learned something new on the prail on my driveway, i would try to learn it switch the same day. after some time and after mastering a lot of the basics, switch tricks became easier. actually i find they often come off better than natural because i dont have all the bad habits for safety. without those habits, i tend to commit 100%. sometimes that makes for bad slams but usually it just translates to better style. besides switch tricks, this broken ankle transformed me in a crazy way - jumping a few levels higher just from the time off. and this has been a recurring theme in my skating, every injury has eventually led to a significant level up. since skating is at least half mental games, it makes sense that you benefit from time off to rest your body while your mind imagineblades. the really long stair rail in this section was in swift current, maybe 3hrs from regina on the way towards medicine hat. while regina is terribly flat, swift current was in a valley, so they had a lot of great spots. the disaster sweaty was a big moment! that was just one of those days and i was in one of those mindsets to try something crazy. somewhere in those years i came to realize that falls were almost never really that bad and just started to go for whatever i wanted to try. i really learned to control my mind and to turn fear into a productive force. especially when you get into the zone its like you tap into the matrix or something. you have sharper focus and faster than usual reaction times to save yourself from bad falls. 99% of the time, nothing bad would happen and id pull off something that i couldnt have imagined even days earlier. this change of mindset over fear led to some really rapid progression and affected all areas of my life in a profound way. the truespin misfit and truespin soyale were also highlights that i was really proud of at the time! hmm and lots of tricks at swan rail again. somewhere around this time i crashed into that cement monument at the bottom and cracked a couple ribs! ouch. just over one month later when they were almost healed up, my wheels got caught in a crack on a poorly constructed ramp and i face-planted from the top of a quarter pipe to my chest on the ground. this was in front of thousands of people at a huge event in calgary. ended up with another cracked rib on the other side! spending all summer with multiple cracked ribs was not fun. theres a funny story about the misfit on the drop rail… an old man came out of that building, furious that we were skating, and headbutted me in the face! it was so crazy. there were three or four of us with shovels and he was like 95, trying to fight us all right there on the icy cement! we just let it be and left him to rage out for the remainder of his days… youre welcome for shovelling the snow off your sidewalk. i didnt have cracked ribs at the time, but that final fall was pretty painful! took a while before i tried that one again...
Posted on: Fri, 03 Oct 2014 05:30:09 +0000
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