Black Friday 2006
What We Did
Around noon on Friday, November 24th, 2006, Dale, Moody, and I met up to do a little Black Friday shopping of our own. Instead of hitting the malls, we went to Lowe's and bought wood, screws, coping, and teflon spray. We headed back to my house after picking up Harry, a local skater and extra set of hands. We set to work building a small kicker and eight foot rail box. Three hours later, we were putting a synthetic ice surface on the finished product.
In the mean time, Moody mounted ice hockey frames on several pair of aggressive inline skate boots.
We finished just in time to hoof it up to the Pelham Civic Complex in Pelham, Alabama. After paying rental fees, we set up the ramps. Over the next few hours, we learned the ropes of a sport few have actually tried. I had been on ice skates a total of two times, making my third time the first time I had used sharpened blades. Luckily, my inline skating background transferred pretty well. Except for Dale, who has been skating almost as long as he's been walking, the Ice Ramps team shared my sentiments.
Within the two hours, we attracted quite a crowd. The hand full of people we brought along to skate had doubled as onlookers joined the party. Everyone seemed to have fun and most of us fell nicely into the burgeoning sport.
What We Didn't Do
We didn't do Ice Ramps. We did aggressive ice skating. I'll explicate the differences. Aggressive ice skating is similar to aggressive inline skating. Grinding rails, hitting launch ramps, and doing spins with grabs on a pair of ice skates is aggressive ice skating. Anyone can do aggressive ice skating (and, indeed, they have). The only really unique thing we did was rivet some ice hockey blades to aggressive inline boots.
Ice Ramps is a niche of aggressive ice skating that uses a particular type of ramp — made of ice. To be clear, we didn't do Ice Ramps. Aggressive ice skating is the foundation. Ice Ramps is the structure on top of it.
Final Thoughts
The Black Friday experiment revealed a number of things.
- Aggressive ice skating is as fun as any other extreme / action sport. Skaters can test the limits of the medium while allowing an outlet for creativity.
- Aggressive ice skating is no more dangerous than any other extreme / action sport. Despite all the falls and lack of pads, no one got hurt. In fact, no one received any scratches, bruises, or ice burn (let alone road rash, which plagues newer inline skaters).
- Aggressive ice skating and Ice Ramps will work. Most of the nay-sayers harped on how landing would cause excessive damage to the ice, slow the skater down too much, or even cause a rip in the very fabric of space-time. Some of the skaters were five or six feet off the ground and landed with no problem. The ice was fine and the employees of the rink were happy to hear we were going to come back.
- The sport has a long way to go. Much like aggressive inline skating was in the early years, aggressive ice skating lacks the equipment needed to be viable (especially sturdy frames, as Moody demonstrated twice). The Ice Ramps frame seeks to solve this problem.
- Synthetic ice just isn't as good as the real thing. While fake ice got the job done, it is by no means a perfect solution. Ice Ramps ultimate goal is to bring ramps made of real ice to the general public. This will take aggressive ice skating to the next level, not slow, fickle synthetic ice.
Most importantly, Friday showed us that there is a market for aggressive ice skating. This is not some lame idea that will only appeal to the founders. This is something that is on the tip of the tongue of every disaffected ice skater. We are giving them a mouth to speak.
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