Another crazy day

Yet again I have earned my salary and then a whole lot more today. It boggles my mind how busy the office can get and only a few weeks before the holidays. But I digress.

Yesterday on Speed Skate World (see the Blog Roll on the right) Peter Doucet mentioned the new 120mm x 3 wheel skate frames. Peter said, "It is unclear when the wheels will be produced and ready for sale due to cost of production and tooling." I have to wonder, perhaps Gyro will have some problems but certainly the manufacture of 120mm wheels is not a complex feat of engineering. After all the two wheel scooters that were such a fashion craze in the early part of this decade used wheels that were approximately the same size. But there has to be a point of diminishing returns with big wheels, I can personally vouch for the difficulty of hacking a turn or even a slight incline in 110s. To say nothing of the loss of surface area as a skater goes from 8 points of contact (four wheels per skate) to 6 points. I have gone over all this ground before, but I still believe that 120mm wheels are taking a good idea, big wheels, and pushing it too far.


On the other hand what can be done to improve and grow the sport of inline skates? Its no secret when big (90/100mm) wheels came out suddenly sales of skates shot way up. I suspect an awful lot of people buy a pair of rec skates and are happy with them for years, it took a major change to get people to upgrade their ten or twelve year-old skates. Would more revolutionary ideas increase sales and hopefully result in more skates on the trails and not in the closet?

My own personal observation is that what is required is a greater feeling of stability and control. The fact is from day one we grow up used to the notion that if we put our feet firmly on the ground we stop moving. Somehow something equivalent has to happen to get the novices to keep trying and not relegate the skates to the back of the closet. I know at least one company had the idea of putting shock absorbers on aggressive skates, which is an interesting idea but what about entry level skates why start with aggressive? One vendor tried putting disk brakes inside skate wheels, I don't know what happened to them but I think the fundamental problem for the novice is the fact that their center of gravity is just too damn high. On a bike you have to stay low and its no great secret put a small sports car and a truck on a tight turn and we all know whats going to happen, either we get an over turned truck or some pretty heavy duty braking, but either way the sports car comes out of the corner an awful lot faster than the truck will. Stability is not achieved through height, but getting low is not easy, if it were, I'd have been at the Pan Am games showing Joey Mantia how its done.

Okay, now I am really depressed, I wanted to make sure I spelled Mantia properly so I Googled JM and now I know, Joey was 9 in 1995, that means he is young enough that I really could have taught him swimming back when I did that sort of thing. Its official I really do feel like an old fart! (The fact that tomorrow I turn 30 drives that point home pretty hard, by the time my dad was my age, he was a father twice over.) There's a transition point when you aren't really a child anymore, suddenly you realize, the biggest concern isn't the next Calculus III assignment, its not balancing the cheque book and the Visa bill, its paying the mortgage and making sure the fridge is properly stocked with fruits and vegetables, and when your dad comes round for dinner his complaint when he peers into the fridge isn't about the lack of food, rather its the lack of beer. Oh well, I can at least draw comfort from the fact that my wife's birthday is not too far away so there is one person who cannot take cracks at my age... well she will but not for very long.

Anyway I did the elliptical machine and a wack of push-ups, its hard work 48 hours after donating, but I feel a lot better for it, but also awfully tired. But tomorrow I think an appropriate thing would be to reminisce about the last decade, you have been warned!