10 City Surfaces Inline Skaters Need To Know

Today all surfaces will be rated with a difficulty wheel. The green wheel denotes an easy feature, the blue is intermediate and the black is difficult. This video is for you if you've spent some time in the rinks and the lots on the trails and you can turn to both sides, you're a decent skater, you can jump just like two inches and you have a strong decisive stop, whatever your mechanism is, you can handle every single one of the obstacles I'm going to be showing you today. None of them are terribly difficult to overcome but there are some little secrets or some approaches that you can take to make life a little easier for yourself. Let's get down there and take a look at 10 surfaces every inline skater needs to know about. Number 10, foot buttons. Those little foot buttons are there to stop strollers and wheelchairs from rolling into traffic. They have very little impact on our narrow wheels. A long strip of these can slow you down if you hit them the right way though. Some are more pronounced than others but they're all quite easy to deal with if you keep your legs soft or bent. Roll these a bunch of times when you start skating and they'll be a non-factor very soon, except maybe when you use them to help stabilize your wheels when stopped. Number nine, person hole cover. The nubbly texture of the manhole or the person hole cover can slow you down quickly. Start by rolling with one foot on the pavement and one foot on the cover lightly until you're comfortable enough to roll across an edge with both feet, then try rolling all the way across. Momentum is your friend when you're going across these. It's important to have bent legs across this texture too. You'll notice too that my feet are staggered, usually about a half to a whole skate length. Number eight, sewer grates. Sewer grates get the black wheel because they're often poorly sunk. They come with hard edges and weird fillers around them, so the predictability factor just isn't there. My tactic for the worst of curbside grates is jumping, striding over them, or sheer avoidance. They can be rolled with rocked back feet, which we'll talk about later, and of course be sure not to roll in the direction of the grate spaces. Your wheels will fit in these spaces. That is not a good stopping technique. Big shout out to super valuable and encouraging sponsor of PSS, Sonic Sports. Sonic Sports has a tool that will make all your skate wrenches obsolete. Look at that design. They've also got pucks, bearings, lubricants, other skate gear, cool clothing, oh and the famed and often imitated original turbo washer for bearings. That's Sonic Sports LA on Instagram. Number seven, grates. Grates in general get the green wheel rating because the answer is just so easy. Avoid these as much as you can. There are just so many different grills on the sidewalks of downtown Toronto that I just can't keep them straight. I know that some will stop me cold even though they look like they can be rolled, and other more hardcore looking ones are quite benign. I don't like the idea of falling on a giant cheese grater, so I'm quite careful when I go over these grates. The little grates around the tree bottoms are usually solid and quite a fast surface. I don't like starting sprints off of grates either. Notice I avoid this grate on the start. I want good traction and full contact with the road. That grill would not give me the grip I need. Number six, cobblestones. There's like a hundred types of cobblestones in this city. Some of it seems impossible when you try it at first, but Cobblestone got the blue wheel for a reason. It escapes the black rating because it's a regular pattern and we skaters are good at cracking foot codes. On the big square cobblestones I usually skate diagonally. On the long bricky type cobblestones, the really rough ones, I skate straight across. I avoid coasting parallel to the deep cracks that separate the stones. That of course is the main danger. This weird irregular stone pattern felt unrollable when I encountered it on this day. Initially I rolled onto it for just a few feet and thought, can this be rolled? And miraculously a few minutes later it felt completely skatable. Just very tiring. I'm always amazed by how quickly the feet and the legs learn to deal with patterns and vibrations too. So while I advise you to give cobblestone your full attention, give it none of your respect. You can own cobblestone, it's a matter of fitness really. Number five, potholes. If you see them, there are many ways to deal with them. Skating is seeing, so always be scanning for potholes. You can roll potholes with staggered feet or you can keep one foot suspended and ready to plant. You can even stride off them. I roll potholes for fun at medium speed or low speed. I do this so my feet are always ready and trained for adverse surfaces. I like it as a training drill, it's fun. I treat every pothole like I'm dropping into a bowl. It's important that I push my feet into the bottom of the bowl aggressively and rock my feet backward to match the opposing pothole face. But really at any decent speed you should just stride over or around potholes. Oh yes, flying over them is always an option. Number four, crack. Crumbling roads suck but a cracked concrete road like this is the ultimate training toy. When I'm rolling over cracks I'm obsessed with carving across the direction of fissures. Cracks these deep can easily divert or even trap your wheels, so I take the opportunity to exaggerate my crack carving technique when in real situations. This stretch is perfect because it forces me to carve in both directions equally. Having a strong one-footed glide opens up surfaces like this one too. Being able to extend or cut short a stride gives you control over whether you want to roll or skip the next feature. Notice how my legs become more bent as the surface difficulty gets higher. When I'm on I'm low. Stay low. Number three, tar snakes. The tar snakes are hibernating right now. They're hard and waxy and I haven't noticed them for like six months and this is when I'm most susceptible. It just takes one day for these filled-in cracks to melt and being able to catch and stop your foot. Never roll close and parallel to these skate traps. Only carve across them. Start treating them like the enemy today. Even if they're not activated, practice like they are. The tar snakes are up to get you. Don't let them brand you with their mark. Some of you will get that. Number two, wood. Really? Number two, wood? That high on the list? Absolutely. Outdoor wood is slippery but that's not the problem. If you slide it out on wood you can get toothpick-sized splinters or even dagger-sized wood shards in your body. Only roll wood that is specifically treated for sports. I don't mean to freak you out but wood can be dangerous. See, even my camera didn't want to witness my wood skating. Don't do it, Bill. Look at these splinters. Number one, streetcar tracks. Streetcar tracks are so dangerous because you get to a point where you think you know how to wheel streetcar tracks and then you encounter one that is not like the others. I'll often cross tracks I don't know very well at an angle. This gives me more time and a better position to gain the most visual cues possible about the height of the rails. If you do roll the streetcar tracks you have to be practiced at rocking the feet back where you pull your toes up towards your shins. I actually combine the rocking of the feet back with a not a jump. Almost floating but maintaining contact with all that is under me. The best way to avoid all troubles is to simply stride over the rails never trusting yourself to roll over anything but concrete. You can time your steps so you can do this. Now stringing it all together here in Sprint Alley you'll notice that I simply skip stride or jump over non-advantageous surface features. While most of this is about timing there are a few moments that I have to roll out the rough on one or both skates. All that pothole and crack training really pays off in these situations. That's it tell me about your favorite surfaces or the surfaces which challenge you the most. As usual we will have the comments section raging with good input on this one. I like to take a look and see what people are talking about and quite often there's like something that comes up that maybe should have been number one on my list. So who's going to have that number one this time? Rolling rough stuff really does turn your legs into like zambonis. No, not zambonis. That would mean the person behind me can skate better because of me. Turns them into like a steadicam suspension gyroscopic contraption. Yeah.