#8. What rollerblading taught me: Part 1/2

Lessons I've learnt during my skating journey: from a beginner to an influencer

Depending on how you’ve come across my name, you most likely know me as a nuclear physicist or a photographer or a rollerblader. In this article I’m writing primarily as a rollerblader, also known as Nazar On Wheels.

Me doing a parallel slide in Turin, Italy (2020)

Introduction

I’m not a big fan of metaphors and analogies, as they are very limited in their purpose. They usually fall apart as soon as you start building any logical structure from them in a new context. But there are a few things I’ve understood in the process of becoming a skater that were not obvious to me earlier, which I’d like to document here – both for myself and for anyone else reading my blog.

I believe that these lessons can extend beyond just skating and can inspire pretty much anyone to look at certain aspects of life from a different angle, including sports, education, career or personal growth. As there are quite a few lessons I want to talk about, I’m dividing them in two parts:

• Part 1 – more technical, focusing on the physical and psychological aspects of becoming a skater and content creator from zero;

• Part 2 – more philosophical, about the mindset and attitude developed by skating that are worth adopting in other aspects of life.

This article is dedicated to Part 1 – how you become a good skater and why it’s worth the effort. If you, or your partner, or your friend, or your kid, or anyone in your circle is a skater or thinking to become one – you might learn something from this.

A bit of history

To begin, let me share a brief history of how I got into skating in the first place, just for some context.

I got on my first rollerblades when I was a kid, maybe around 10 years old. That was my main outdoor leisure activity for a couple of years, until I got a bicycle. It peaked on one summer when almost every day I would go with my friend to skate near a construction site at the Minska (Мінська) metro station in Kyiv 🇺🇦. We would borrow their bricks to build obstacles that we could jump over, gradually increasing the hight and length of our jumps.

That was probably when my love for tricks started, since simply skating on flat ground seemed pretty boring after that. Over the next 1-2 years I’ve broken a few pairs of skates and eventually stopped, when I got a bicycle. Yet my obsession with tricks remained throughout other activities, being it riding a bike, learning breakdance, parkour or acrobatics.

For the next 18 years I didn’t have any rollerblades, but I did occasionally skate on ice, maintaining the feeling that “I know how to skate“. Everything changed at the end of 2018, when I tried skiing for the 1st time. Even though I was still far from a confident skier, I made it to the bottom of a pretty steep slope, very proud of myself. 😎 But most importantly, it refreshed in my memory that feeling of adrenaline that comes from realizing the risk of failing and the feeling of joy after finally succeeding.

That’s when I bought my 1st pair of skates, as a cheaper and more accessible alternative to skiing. To my surprise, when I’d put them on I was as bad as a complete beginner – nowhere close to the memory of me jumping over bricks and curbs when I was a kid. So I basically had to start from zero, watching YouTube tutorials again, which was quite a humbling experience.

It so happened that I also had a GoPro camera, which I’d bought impulsively in the past and never even opened. So I decided to make use of it by documenting my progress while skating, thinking that it will help me see my improvements and keep going. Since I love cinematography, I’d soon started adding music to my videos and posting them on YouTube. As I always seek improvement in whatever I do, I started watching tutorials on how to make videos look more professional and eventually started an Instagram account as well.

This below ⬇️ is my best video from the video-production perspective. It wasn’t the peak of my skating skills, but I’ve put a lot of thought into composition, shooting on 2 cameras (Sony Alpha II + GoPro Hero4) and editing in sync with the beautiful soundtrack from my friend – Simplify¹ by Polygrim.

By 2021 I’ve become relatively well known in the Wizard-skating community – a fairly niche style of skating that I was particularly passionate about. As a result, I’ve received some free equipment prototypes from a couple of brands to test them, providing some feedback and making video reviews.

The notable early prototypes I’ve tested and reviewed where:

• Ronin and Dragon rockered frames from NN Skates²

• 4100 rockered frame from Rockin’ Frames³

In February 2022, when the war in Ukraine started, I’ve stopped skating and making videos, as I didn’t have the “having-fun” mindset for quite a while. Eventually I got back to occasional skatepark sessions or city rides – just to keep myself in shape and not lose the muscle memory.

Investment of effort

I want to start with probably the most important reason why rollerblading is not as popular as more common kinds of sport, like running, cycling or going to the gym. As I’ve mentioned, all these kinds of activities feel pretty boring compared to skating, yet most people choose them. I think the reason is – it requires a significant investment of effort to learn skating decently enough before you can actually enjoy it.

At the beginning, when I started relearning how to skate, I’ve spent many days in a corner of a parking lot just training my balance, how to push, how to stop, how to turn and even how to fall properly. I had to become good and confident enough before I could start skating anywhere around other people. This is where you can properly feel the joy of skating, gliding through space like a super-human. But at the parking lot it’s not fun.

That phase of feeling weak and clumsy, falling every minute, is really frustrating. So you have to be ready to invest your time and effort into pushing through it, knowing that eventually it will actually become enjoyable. This inevitable phase is present in other kinds of sports as well, like skateboarding, skiing or snowboarding. That’s why some people give up in the middle, before reaching the fun part, while many – don’t even start.

Just to demonstrate what I mean, this is my very first video, when I’d just started feeling confident enough to go outside of a parking lot, into the wild. My moves were much less fluent, felt not very enjoyable and it was even worse before that.

This is very similar to one of my favorite fragments from BoJack Horseman – the ending of Season 2, when he was trying to do jogging: “Every day it gets a little easier. But you got to do it every day. That's the hard part.“

Visual target

Even though I’ve always been quite patient and able to systematically learn new things, it still only works if there is a sense of incremental improvement. Without it I eventually become desperate and give up.

The best way to see this incremental improvement is to have a clear target that you can look up to, such that after every increment you get a little closer to it. Without a target you may improve random aspects of your skills that don’t necessarily add up to something actually useful. A fixed target forces you to focus your effort in one direction, making the improvement more visible.

Nicola Torelli

For me the first such target was Nicola Torelli – an Italian skater whose selfie-stick-style videos I came across on Instagram. At that time he was mostly doing very dynamic free-skate sessions on busy city streets. This combination of impressively high speed in environments full of obstacles and his effortless flow through it made him look like a superman. But I knew that in reality he’s just a human, so I could learn to be like him too.

That kind of urban flow became my target. I knew exactly what kind of video tutorials to watch and what to learn. The bar has been set.

Leon Basin

When I’ve become fairly comfortable skating on the streets, I’ve come across another video that immediately became my new target, and remains my absolute favorite to this day: “The Wizard of Wall Street“ starring Leon Basin, produced by Mike Torres. First of all, it was at the whole new level in terms of production quality – it was something you want to watch on a big screen with good acoustics.

It was a proper short film with a distinctive aesthetic feel to it, both in Mike’s filming and in Leon’s skating. But most importantly, I saw the kind of movements that I had never seen before. His skates were unlike any other at that time, with 4 huge wheels on a long massive frame creating this captivating metal-sound effect. And the way he moved on those skates was absolutely mesmerizing.

It was beyond effortlessly fluent. It seemed to defy laws of physics. I’d spend hours rewatching various parts of this video, going through them frame by frame, trying to figure out how the hell he did it. For my level of skating at the time those moves seemed absolutely impossible, so it became my new target.

I had later discovered that it was a fairly new and relatively unknown style of skating, called Wizard Skating⁴, and the most incomprehensible of those moves is called Gazelle⁵. Eventually I’ve mastered it during the lockdown, and even though I never reached the Leon’s level of mastery, the amount of incremental improvements I did on the way to it was far beyond my expectations. And I’m sure I would have given up much earlier if I didn’t have this video as an inspiration and constant reminder of how damn cool I will be when I learn it. 😎

Side view

Another crucial aspect of learning something really well is having an objective view of yourself from outside. In the case of rollerblading it means filming yourself.

When you’re learning a new trick, you don’t know how it’s supposed to feel – you only know how it’s supposed to look, based on what you’ve seen when somebody else did it. So when you’re trying it again and again, for more than a hundred times, you feel that you’re slowly getting better, which can make you think that you’re already good. What often happens is that you film yourself and realise that you’re nowhere close to what you’d imagined.

This is particularly common at the beginning, when you haven’t developed the muscles to jump high enough, or swag to lean far enough, or confidence to go fast enough. Seeing yourself from the side lets you face the reality, see your mistakes and improve much faster.

This is very similar to what Ife Kuku Thomas calls the First Mirror in her framework of Three Mirrors of Radical Honesty⁶.

For completeness, I should also say that sometimes it works the other way around, mostly with tricks that are very technical. Wizard skating in particular is full of subtle moves or balance shifts that are almost impossible to notice from outside, but they make a huge difference to how it feels in the process.

In those cases even videos don’t help. What does help is the randomness. Every time you repeat the same trick, something in your moves is slightly different. And when you’re doing it long enough, eventually, by pure coincidence, you do the right thing. Unintentionally, maybe because you got distracted. And that’s when you immediately notice the difference and realise that this is how it’s supposed to feel, not the other hundred times from before. And from that moment you intentionally do small variations until you get that feeling again, and again, until it becomes fully controlled, and eventually – fully automatic.

Muscle strength and technique

The best thing about rollerblading is that it makes you physically fit, without the struggle of becoming physically fit. Your muscles getting stronger is simply a byproduct of having fun.

Whether you’re skating on the street or doing tricks in a skatepark, you spend most of the time with your knees bent. Otherwise you can’t push or control your balance or absorb impact after landing. So your muscles are working out all the time, from just being on skates. You do get tired physically of course, but not mentally.

One of the surprising things I’ve realised in this period of occasional skating is how disconnected the pure muscle strength is from the technique. When I was learning different wizard-skating moves, I was doing it wrong hundreds of times until I did it right. And doing it wrong meant that I would force some moves by brute force, trying to make my skates repeat a pattern that I’ve seen in some video. And it required a lot of physical effort, pushing my skates against the natural way they wanted to go.

I struggled not because I wasn’t strong enough, but because my technique wasn’t exactly right. Eventually, by coincidence, I leaned a little bit more and moved my hips a few milliseconds earlier, and suddenly there was no resistance from the skates. They repeated that same pattern effortlessly, and that’s when I knew that it not only looked right but also felt right.

So now, when I don’t skate very often, my muscles and ankles are not nearly as strong as they used to be. But the technique is still in my muscle memory, so I can repeat most of the tricks by simply contracting the right muscles at the right time. Certainly there is less elegance and magnitude in my moves, but building strength on demand is way easier than building technique.

Hardware matters

When a random person looks at a pair of skates they see a shoe with wheels attached to it. Maybe they will note a colour of the wheels (because the boot is usually black anyway), but that’s pretty much it. And that’s what I saw when buying my first pair of skates – the old black Rollerblade Twister 80.

As my skills were improving, I started noticing different things about the skates that weren’t perfect or didn’t feel exactly right. And what I realised is that there are tons of parts that can be changed in a skate, and there are tons of different brands that I’ve never heard of, producing those kinds of parts. The boot, the liner in the boot, the insole in the liner, the laces, the frame, the wheels, the bearings, even the spacer between bearings inside the wheel – each of these things exist in many variations made by different manufacturers.

Just wheels alone have so many different aspects to them:

• diameter – affects the ride smoothness

• profile shape – affects speed and rolling resistance

• core structure – affects weight and impact transfer

• polyurethane hardness – affects grip and sliding resistance

And then you can have different colours, LED lights, metal sparkles, rebound layers. It’s a massive amount of variations in just a wheel. In a complete skate – that’s a whole universe that you can play with. And that degree of customisation is what turns a regular pair of skates into your pair of skates. It reflects your anatomy, your character, your skating style, your environment.

Speaking of environment, for example, smooth streets of Geneva 🇨🇭 can be enjoyable on small hard 76mm wheels, which would be a nightmare on the rough streets of Turin 🇮🇹. But switch to a bigger setup with softer 100mm wheels and it becomes pure joy in Turin, but potentially too fast for Geneva.

⬇️ These are just a fraction of setups that I’ve been skating over the years, and each of them had a unique feel to it. Only after experiencing enough of them I could properly understand how each aspect of every component makes an impact. So now I know exactly what I need and why, in every given situation, being it a bowl in a new skatepark or city streets of Toronto (yes, I’ve skated there too).

A few skate configurations I've used over the 4 years of intense skating

Good hardware also matters

One thing I’ve seen people say sometimes is – you don’t need high-quality skates to be good at skating. And they’re technically right in a way, because most of the tricks I’ve learnt, I can also do on the shittiest pair of skates. But there is a fundamental difference between learning a technique and executing a technique.

The first thing that a shitty pair of skates does, it makes it less enjoyable and less comfortable. It doesn’t really matter when you’re doing a trick once, just to prove the point. But it matters massively when you’re repeating it a 100 times in a row trying to learn a trick. Pressure points, sore feet and wheels that don’t roll properly – all that adds even more struggle to the already frustrating process of learning, making it more likely that you give up.

Another important point is that when you don’t know the technique yet, there are million possible ways of doing it wrong and only one way of doing it right. So you need that randomness effect to do its job, accidentally making the move that feels right. But when your skates don’t roll consistently enough, or the boot doesn’t hold your foot properly – that adds even more possible variations that you have no control over. That means that it will take even longer for the right combination to happen by accident, making you more likely to quit.

So yes, you don’t need advanced skates if you just want to go for a casual 1-hour skate a few times a month, since you probably won’t feel much difference. But if you want to do anything more advanced that requires consistent repetition – shitty skates will make your life way harder than it should be. And in that case it’s better to start with a good foundation – a skate that at least allows customization and upgrades when the need comes. Cheap skates usually don’t have that foundation.

Epilogue

Throughout my skating journey I sometimes asked myself this one question:
“Am I just being childish and immature? Should I just grow up and go the gym?“.

After all, the core aspect of skating that makes it so valuable for me is the fun and thrill I get from landing a trick that feels cool. That kind of joy is usually what drives kids, while adults seem to be content with more pragmatic and seemingly less fun activities. Things like running in a park, swimming in a pool, lifting weights in a gym or even playing tennis – they all have this more adult vibe of discipline and effort for the sake of outcome rather than pure joy.

This made me rethink my attachment to common wisdom and opinions of others – what some might refer to as social anxiety. This and other more philosophical aspects of rollerblading I will discuss in the 2nd part of this series, including:

• trusting the process despite fear;

• danger of hesitation;

• gradual build-up of complexity;

• effort behind effortless;

• groups driving bravery.

1. Simplify from Descent EP by Polygrim, Spotify

2. NN Skates company, Website

3. Rockin’ Frames company, Website

4. Wizard Skating brand founded by Leon Basin, website

5. Fakie Gazelle tutorial by Rollerbalding, YouTube

6. Three Mirrors of Radical Honesty book by Ife Thomas, website