We got a crew of seven together at the weekend to go and ride at Halifax. With the trip down to Halifax being quite far the session usually ends up being an all-day-thing, so it's a lot better when there's a group.
The night before that, I re-laced my 32s with the spare set of laces that you get with the boots. Although the boots are looking a little tired, it's only really the laces that have worn (one was ready to snap), the other wear is mainly superficial. With the new laces on, they felt new again...
Onto the riding. Well, I'd been keeping an eye on the weather forecasts because it rained all of last week so I was hoping there'd still be some rain left for Saturday. The forecast backed this up, but by time we got there the slope was already starting to dry out.
Bring out the washing-up liquid.
It did turn a little overcast in the middle, and we actually got a small amount of rain which made it better to ride on for a short period. Overall it was still a fairly dry session, but I reckon the slope was marginally faster than the previous times I've ridden there. I wish the sprinkler setup worked properly...
There were two things that I wanted to try this time around: backside 3s and a mini barrel roll backflip. Both were kind of successful.
More pleasing than both the bs 3 and the barrel roll though, I learned something important about the way that I have been, or not been as the point goes, spinning.
I was watching Mike doing some backside rotations and I realised that as he left the kicker his head was turned way more than mine. It made me think that I haven't been using my head half as much as I should have been doing.
I tried a few things out and all of a sudden I could spin a backside 3: but it was fairly smooth, not like before. Excellent. Turning my head more confidently also helped with frontside rotations, which in the past, have always been a little under-cooked. I need to practice some more to (a) get the timing of the head turn with takeoff from the kicker dialed, and (b) stop putting too much weight on my heals when spinning a fs 3 on the snowflex, which is still bugging me; but in general, this felt like a big step forward.
Grant took some video on his camera which includes a couple of shots of the first few backside 3s that I attempted on the kicker. Actually, the first attemp with me slamming big style wasn't on film; shame. I'll post this when I get a hold of it.
In the mean time, here's the short sequence of my first snowflex-mini-barrel-rolls...
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