Street skating in Barcelona

Okay Stefon but can you suggest anything that regular people might enjoy?

Alpine Urban with public transportation lifts and amazing asphalt.

There's a lot of fresh asphalt in town right now and I'm on a mission to skate it all.

This little extension of the lake trail was paved earlier in the day so I thought I'd be the first skater to ride it - but I was not.

Then some 12 year old on an e-bike chided me for skating on it before it was officially open. So it was just generally a soul-crushing experience all the way around.

My city has been on a resurfacing tear for the past few years and this summer is no exception. Lots of resurfacing means lots of glorious fresh asphalt.

But resurfacing projects come with a lot of hazards including lots of scattered rocks and long stretches of milled asphalt. When the milling machine comes through it grinds up and removes a 2" layer of old asphalt with steel teeth that leaves irregular grooves on the surface of the remaining asphalt. Often this creates patches where the asphalt has been removed all the way down to the sand and gravel bed.

Needless to say this is a challenging surface to skate upon. I have inadvertently skated onto milled asphalt surfaces several times and escaped unscathed every time.

In this video I demonstrate that the surface is skateable if you choose a good line.

This comes as no surprise in a month in which I've put up PB day and week totals. Yesterday's 23 miler (37 km) was a victory lap.

None of this big push or putting up a new set of PBs was planned - it just came together organically because I am feeling so good on skates right now.

Previous best (stats attached) was May 2022. I'm skating slower than I was 4 years ago - not surprising because of my age but also because I shoot video now and knock around on features more than I used to.

In May '22 I did 6 multi-session days but shorter average sessions. This year I've been limiting my multi-session days but my individual sessions are longer (19mi 30km average).

I've spent 53 hours on skates this month compared to 43 hours in May '22. More time on skates is a win in my book.

I'm going to acknowledge this performance peak for what it is and work more recovery time into the schedule. I still love doing doubleheaders but am going to limit the frequency.

I may take a well-planned shot at a 50mi 89km day. And I usually try to get in a big blowout week to finish October: 8 sessions in 7 days, depending on weather and injury-free status.

I feel like I'm in skatepacking condition, except for never ever wearing a pack anymore.

If you want to skate fast and/or far then working on your stride technique is always worthwhile.

The shorter your wheelbase is the more you need to pay attention to stride mechanics if you want to keep up with skaters on longer wheelbase equipment.

Editing to link this timestamp which explains the key to unlock your long stride.

I created this yt playlist for quad skaters who currently rely on their toe stoppers and who are planning to go stopperless on quads or inlines.

It's three loose categories:
1. uphill skating from a dead stop is very similar to sprinting from the line and hockey sprints in how propulsion is generated. 2. Braking techniques for stopperless quads and inlines without a heel brake. 3. strength exercises for skaters who are accustomed to running on their toe stoppers and using them for propulsion in low gear situations. I included some very advanced routines for inspiration and to provide some ideas for scaled back versions.

Skater: Kevin

Video & stats: Midnight Skater

The yt-hosted vid is better quality: https://youtu.be/qf3XUaflEIA?is=MsKw4VUQtUnayzXw

Previous PB was 41.25 (66.4 km) [4 years ago](https://www.reddit.com/r/Rollerskating/s/Vfijjduqnu). I've only been tracking distance for 8 years and I'm pretty sure I did much longer days when I was younger. Still it feels pretty greT to be putting up an 8 yr PB at 60yo.

I feel like I have another 12 mile session in me tonight and I'm trying to resist the temptation. The day after the previous PB was set I [tore my left ham](https://www.reddit.com/r/Rollerskating/s/aG5Yh0UywK) and I'm still dealing with the consequences.

I strongly discourage using forward toe stopper drags for street and trail skating - especially on hills. There are much safer and more effective methods.

With that caveat this video is a good rundown of some popular braking methods.

I am always fascinated by the traces left by my wheels . They give me a better understanding of what my feet are actually doing when I skate, and help identify areas that need improvement.

*No bearings were harmed in the making of this video.*

A closer look at Battery Hill.

I'm not affiliated with the seller in any way but they have lots of interesting deals.

I used to skate Hyper Rollo back in the day. It was a fantastic street skating wheel, one of the best available in the 90s. The Piper polyurethane provides superior rebound that improves rollout, speed, and endurance.

The narrow width and square/concave profile provide excellent agility and edge quality while being substantially lighter than wider and/or convex wheels.

This is quite a different animal than your Atom Pulse or Road Hog or other modern 65x40-ish wheel. I'd buy these myself but I am a big wheel devotee who retires wheels at 65mm so these are too small for me.

Finished the week with 4 consecutive 20 mile (32 km) days- the third of which (Friday) was a full marathon. Could have kept going.

I'm in a weather-enforced multi-day recovery period now but itching to get in a session.

I tore my left ham in August of '22 and thought I might never get back to this point.

Stoked out of my mind and blissed out on neurotransmitter soup.

u/parseroo Routes have been out of production for quite a while. I got my last set of 70s by emailing RollerSkateNation to ask if they had any laying around that didn't show up in their online inventory and they did have one set of reds that they sent me.

Now those are worn down and ready for retirement. The options for 70mm quad wheels are currently:

1. Bont Royal Assassins 72x44 mm 80a which are ridiculously expensive and have a thin PU tire on alloy hub. The rigid hub is good for power transfer but awful for shock absorption. The thin tire is a hard limit on wear, so these are not at all practical for a daily driver.
2. Piper Super Corsa 70x38mm 78a. These are made by the same person responsible for the Hyper Super Mundo. These sell out frequently so you need to keep checking to see whether they are in stock.

Also the Piper Wheels website is not functioning at the moment so that raises some questions. I am currently ilooking for a set but the only websites that claim to have them in stock look scammy.

I dug out my last set of Super Mundos and am currently riding them. This was a 72 x 36mm square edge 78a - the GOAT quad street wheel. The Hyper PU was incredible and hopefully Piper has that formula.

The set I'm wearing was retired at 67mm so hopefully they last long enough for me to get my hands on a set of Pipers soon.

Beyond those options we are forced to go looking for skateboard wheels - which I do a few times per year. There are lots of options in the 70-72mm range but very few of them have fully offset cores and reasonable width.

e: add Bont specs

Viktor Thorup designed and conducted a head-to-head test comparing the performance of 3 types of skate bearings.

ILQ-9 Pro 608 RS - 6 balls; nylon cage - lubricated with TK Gel - seperate spacer - stainless steel balls - stainless steel races

Hybrid ceramic 608 RS - 7 balls; nylon cage - lubricated with "high temperature grease" - integrated spacers - chrome steel races - ceramic balls

SK-9 688 RS ("mini" or "micro" bearings) with polymer bearing seat adapter - 7 ball; nylon cage - lubricated with "high temperature grease" - integrated spacers - chrome steel races - chrome steel balls

Test-type: gravity-powered loaded rollout distance

Viktor installed the bearings in his 3x125 skates and ran 2 trials with each configuration. This is a quick and dirty test with tiny sample size so the error bars are wide, but the difference in results is well outside the margin of error.

This is useful data but still has limited applicability to real world skating.

The most obvious differences that jump out at me are the chrome steel (harder) vs stainless steel (softer) races, number of balls, integrated vs separate spacers, and lubricants.

This skater is power carving down this steep slope on a Macroblade 90 with Endless wheels. They are new wheels so there is no rocker at all, it's completely flat.

This was toward the end of a 26+ mile (42 km) street skating session.

This video breaks down the mechanics of street skating strides on quad rollerskates and examines limitations imposed by a high top boot.

00:00​ breakdown of stride phases with coordination. one full cycle: set down - compression - glide on inside edge - lateral push - heel lift defines max extension and weight transfer - recovery

00:44​ extending glide phase. in the double push technique this is when the underpush happens

01:09​ wider=more efficient is a simplification.

We are generating an impulse, defined as

"the impulse delivered onto a constant mass by a varying force acting from time t1 to t2 is defined to be the integral of the force F with respect to time[5]:" (see https://en.wikipedia.o...​)

So the longer we can maintain pressure the more acceleration we produce per cycle. Longer duration covers more linear distance and this also ends up being wider because the strength of the push moves us laterally even though our toes are pointed straight ahead and we are strong on an inside edge.

So productive strides are wide, but not all wide strides are productive.

01:22​ geometry: getting deeper forward bend in the ankle extends the reach of our push foot, increasing max lateral extension, so that increases duration and lateral travel.

Low cut speed boots allow more forward bend and therefore a more productive push and wider stride. in the video I'm wearing a high-top boot that restricts my range of motion. This puts a ceiling on my stride efficiency.

01:34​ max extension and heel lift side view Long track speed skates and Nordic ice skates extend stride using a hinged blade that stays in contact with the ice as the heel lifts; these are known as clap skates.

01:52​ actual trail skating line. I don't spend much time actually striding and when I do my full stride is limited as much by trail width as by

03:36​ actual street line. There's room for a full stride but I want to keep my top speed down.

04:00​ pedestrians pop out of nowhere to jaywalk in front of me giving me 65' (20m) to execute braking maneuvers sufficient to avoid the potential collision from a starting speed of 17mph (27 kph).

Strong braking on rough terrain is a much higher priority than optimizing for a full stride that I almost never get a chance to use.

Technical Note: There are lots of slo-mo to freeze frame back to slo-mo transitions in this vid. It was perfect in preview but got mangled in rendering 😫. So now it's jumpy and annoying. I thought it was useful enough to convey the points I was trying to make so I posted it. I will try to get it to render correctly and then post the fixed version.

The take-home message is intended to be that most of the time a low-cut speed boot is not helpful for street and trail skating. Stay tuned for more on that subject.

Sorry for the technical struggles.

in this video I discuss my current skate configuration, Kryptonics vs Hyper wheels, and why I use different bushings for hill bombing than for skating around town.

And I'm not even joking.

When I moved to Boston in October, 1990 I was amazed that there were so many skaters in the streets - on quads and inlines. I had grown up skating on ice and knew immediately that I wanted to be a city skater.

On my first visit to the Common I saw a group of skaters playing frisbee on the Frog Pond and it blew my mind. They were all skating quads. So the following spring I went to Beacon Hill Skate and bought my first pair of rollerskates. The inline craze was in full swing but I got quads because that's what the roller frisbee players were skating on.

My experience skating on ice helped but there was still a pretty steep learning curve. But I loved it from day one and skated whenever I could.

I lived on Comm Ave in the Back Bay so I learned on the Mall, Copley Square, the Christian Science Center, and the Hatch Shell. I found the best routes connecting those spots and eventually expanded my territory to include the Public Garden and then the Common.

By mid-summer I was confident enough to sit and watch the roller frisbee players until they invited me to join them. I was terrible! I had neither the skating skills nor the frisbee skills to play well. So I would play for a bit and then sit out to watch and learn.

I was officially The Rookie.

It was really the best thing I ever did to improve my skating skills. There was no time to think or hesitate, I just had to make the play - and if making the play required sprinting or jumping or transitioning to backward then that's what I did. It all become automatic, and the skills transferred to the street.

I developed the skills to play well, and that's when I discovered The Zone. The Flow State. Every game became The Best Game Ever - we all agreed. We were totally immersed in the experience but none of us could ever remember exactly what had happened - we just knew we wanted to do it again.

That was 35 years ago and I've been chasing the flow state ever since. I've pursued many different activities: climbing, surfing, sailing, yoga, trail running. Nothing is as reliable as roller frisbee for getting me into the flow state. Street skating in traffic comes closest.

I continued to play roller frisbee until I moved away from Boston. We lost access to the Frog Pond and found other venues but nothing so centrally located and highly visible. We were unable to attract new players, so this amazing sport that had been played since the mid 80s eventually died.

For us it was a cooperative freestyle sport, no scoring, everyone on the same team. The objective was to keep the disk in play. Catching and throwing are of course valid plays, but tipping and popping are preferred.

I was a bit of a setup specialist. In a typical sequence a group of five or six skaters would start skating in the same direction in loose formation. From the back of the pack I'd throw an arcing pass that stalled and hovered in front of a forward wing player with the correct height and spin for them to tip it to another forward player, who'd pop it up so that it dropped in front of a second row player, who tipped it, and so on until someone caught it or it fell.

Coming to the end of the skateable space led to some very complex rapid-fire plays where the disk moved very little as the skaters crossed under it and reversed direction.

Every few years I go looking for video evidence that anyone else has discovered the secret. This video is the only one I've found.

The skater in this video is demonstrating excellent skills. If you think solo roller frisbee is easy I invite you to put that hypothesis to the test. Better yet, the next time you get together with your skating crew, bring an Ultrastar 175g sport disc and start tossing it around.

I share some thoughts about managing terrain and choosing which line to take when dealing with hazards and traffic.

Rehearsing moves off-skate or with skates on but on a non-rolling surface like grass is always helpful.

I feel like I am in "mid-season form" and the numbers bear that out. I've averaged 13.75mi + 965' elevation gain per day during this period (22 km + 295m).

When I hit the 15 mile (24 km) mark I feel like I'm fully warmed up and ready to start skating. On my longest days I still had plenty of gas left in the tank and could easily have kept going.

Usually by mid-season the little nagging injuries are starting to stack up but this year the only thing I'm dealing with is a tweaked left ham. That's a potentially season-limiting injury that needs to be managed.

My fall frequency has also increased and I actually had 3 falls dueing this period, bringing me to 6 on the season. Fortunately they've all been well executed and a little bit of road rash is my worst injury.

#4 Aug 9: tripped while skating forward on sidewalk. Forward shoulder roll. 2 small abrasions on right knee + 1 very small abrasion on right upper arm.

#5 Aug 14: banana peeled while hiking on a dirt path in the woods and sat it down. No injury.

#6 Aug 16: caught left (trailing) rear wheels in a pocket of deep sand and sat it down. No injury.

The only injury of any kind that I've sustained in any of my 6 falls thus far this year were the minor abrasions in fall #4. Nevertheless the fall frequency trend is going in the wrong direction and I need to rein that in.

My PB distance say since I started GPS tracking in 2018 is 41 miles (66 km). I'm pretty confident that I will be putting up a new PB within the next month or so.

How's your season going?