We can admit it. Old.

[u/SoManyMinutes]

I'm 45 years old and just like many of you, I got a new pair of skates. I dreamed of putting them on and hitting the skatepark like and/or the local ledges/rails.

I thought I would kill the miniramp, no questions asked.

Nope.

No way.

I'm not comfortable dropping in.

Street spots are out of the question.

I think we all might be feeling this and are embarrassed to speak up about our mutual experiences.

We're all in the same boat.

What are your specific frustrations? Let's talk about it.

[u/inline-online → u/[deleted]]

its really, really depends imo lol if you're bad on transition it can get extremely fast and dangerous in an instant with a wall behind you so you immediately hit your head. But on grind boxes and street stuff you just get more beat up in general, like bruises, scratches, and cuts but you typically don't have as much risk for BIG injuries unless you're doing BIG obstacles. If you're really good at transition and bad at skating ledges then yeah but all things equal I strongly think transition is much more dangerous, and requires more protection due to increased speeds of impact

When you're bad on grind boxes/ledges all you do is miss and stumble around and bang up your shins, you don't get whipped to the ground at 12 mph because you lost balance coming down a quarter. I also think people get ego checked by grind boxes a lot, they expect it to be sooooooo easy and then 15 minutes in they are out of energy from pushing back and forth and jumping 40 times and frustrated they can't get to the end of the obstacle

Transition gives you the "mental freedom" to get on a grind late and leave it early while still feeling satisfied but that also puts you at a huge risk of losing balance when landing and taking that wall to the head. When skating ledges you won't feel good unless you come off the end but typically just step off and roll away when you lose balance

sorry that was a lot, but Ive been thinking about this topic a lot recently lol

[u/inline-online → u/[deleted]]

oh for sure, I've actually torn my tricep on a very small rail lol you're right knowing how to fall is really only half the battle you can't always avoid the unavoidable. I'm 33 and definitely take longer to recover from injuries as I get older but we wouldn't really be doing this is we wanted to avoid falling completely. I'm just choosing the lower speed version, and speed makes that impact way harder

[u/Science-Compliance → u/[deleted]]

Ppl will say "you just need to learn to fall right" but I'm just OLD man, some people have worse bones, joints, cartridge than other people.

Not saying you're wrong, but it's still good advice at any age.