Timeline and Milestones

Timeline and Milestones
This is an ongoing list, and I look forward to it unfolding. The dates approximate until I catch up to the present and move forward day by day.
Lots of the info can be found in the blog, but I like the idea of this page like this for dramatic effect.

· Major childhood skating era:
First board was a Nash with spray on grip and no tail. 1979. Age 6.

First real board was a Vision Gator, maybe ’85. By the end of that era I was always skating Lance Mountain minis and Caballeros. I was placing in the top of New England tri-state contests, came in second twice. Lots of jump ramps, high ollies and grinds and slides on picnic tables, curbs, and down stairs. Some kickflips. Wasn’t too technical, we were all of the era, very Natas Kaupas and Guerrero and Mark Gonzales influenced. Was also skating halfpipes at the end. Never had a double tail board back then.
Most notable childhood skate memories: Just being with my true bros, all day and night, all the time. Wallrides, 720s off jump ramps, tailslides, every manner of boneless and street plant, a few low handrails, bombing hills doing fifteen foot power slides. I’d launch off a ramp while holding an extra board in my back hand, do a method air on the one I was riding, then switch to a lien air on the other board, and land on that second board. Called it a “two aboard your mother.”

Distance Ollie contests. As kids we’d get 20+ skaters together and play a game of elimination. We’d set one of our boards on the street (remember, old school, 10.5 inches wide), and everyone who could Ollie it would proceed to try two boards wide, etc, until it always came down to the same few “finalists.” My buddy Chuck and I ended up being tied for the “winners” of the longest during that era. 22 boards, plus a free style deck. Sometimes we’d slightly overlap the edges of the decks, so there’s no way to know exactly how long that was. I’d say somewhere between 15 to 18 feet. Loooong flatground ollies.

· 2005. Bought a modern board. It had shitty bearings and I snapped it ollieing into a board slide on a parking block, within a week.

·November 2010, moved to the mecca of skateboarding, Los Angeles. This city looks like a skatepark. Every block has tons of spots. My eternal skater eyes immediately began tracing lines on tricks I’d have done in my youth.

· Late September/Early October 2012. Beginning of my adult era. My craigslist bike breaks, I sometimes walk 3 miles home at night after the bus stops. For this reason a good friend from a horrible day job offers to put together a board for me using spare parts. It’s all over the place with broken bushings, too small trucks, too big wheels, worn tail. But I’m immediately hooked. For the first couple weeks I think I’ll just skate everywhere and carve around.

· Third week of October 2012: I try ollieing and have a hard time getting the board under control. Can’t really land a moving Ollie without going 90° frontside and jumping off the board. But am hooked and decide to get my own setup, piece by piece.

· October 20th. I buy a $20 Pharmacy deck.

· Fourth week in October: I get my own trucks. Independent.

· The next day, end of October: Feeling light and powerful, now with the ability to land little rolling Ollies. Cruising up La Brea with potato wedges I try to avoid sidewalk traffic and Ollie off the sidewalk onto the street, off an incline created by a tree pushing up the sidewalk. The wheels stop in a crack, I go down hard and sprain both wrists. On my right wrist I tear the ligaments and spend about 3.5 months in a splint and brace.

· The day after the sprain I got new bearings and Deathwish wheels. Despite being in pain and feeling handicapped, I’m stoked to have completed my own setup. On the way home, skating, I hit another sidewalk crack and slam onto my wrists again.

· First week in November, 2012. By now I’ve seen someone land a tre flip, on a video, and it inspires me to learn all the babysteps to learn these tres. I begin this blog in the form of a private journal.

· Beginning of November. I start trying to learn Popshovits. After a week of serious practice, while wearing a brace on my wrist, I start landing. Popshovits.

· November 3. I break the second toe on my right foot. Now 9 months later it’s still all swollen and painful. I keep jamming it.

· Mid-November. I finally go to the hospital. They think my wrist is broken, I rack up a $3,000 bill, and then they say I had broke it as a kid and now it’s even stronger. Still though, the ligaments are torn and I’m stuck with the bill.

· End of November. I start working on, and landing, kickflips. Weak, wobbly, tons of falls. Knees and shins get bloody. Stationary. I don’t realize at the time, but I’m doing them 80s style, kicking down off the side, not flicking off the nose. I’m landing them, but it’s hard to conceive of doing it moving. Center of balance was off when my foot was prepared to flip it down off the side.

· No Comply November. While being so injured and while not knowing tons of stuff, I am thrilled to practice all kinds of no complies, including some nice ones into a wallie.

· November/December: First grinds and board slides on curbs and parking blocks. Still mostly working on no complies, Ollies, Popshovits.

· Christmas: I get pads for Christmas. I hate the pads. I also understand and appreciate them. But again, I hate the pads. Still do. But they are now 6 months old and are trashed. I am glad it wasn’t all damage to my knees and shins. New adult era.

· Hard to describe, but there’s a certain well-grounded, almost spiritual connection anyone -skater or non skater-can attain by making a solid relationship with a location. Terrain. Habitat. By January I have this feeling, almost like a love affair, with the parking lot of the Koreatown library. I spend many evenings there, avoiding everything, disliking most things, except skating.

· January 19th. I start this skate journal as a blog.

· End of January. I land my first Varial Flip. I start landing more and more of them.

· Beginning to mid February. I have a total breakdown, I get vertigo and am too dizzy to do much of anything for a couple weeks. I can’t stand anything other than skating, which in a very real way has just showed up and saved my life.

· Mid to late February. Before that vertigo, my stationary kickflips were up to an 80% make rate. While in bed I watch YouTube footage of slow motion tricks, and I realize I’m doing kickflips wrong. Getting back to skating I can’t land kickflips the proper way. At all. I start from scratch again and relearn kickflips. Doing them correctly, it is now much easier for me to do them while rolling.

· February 22. I devise a simple methodical, quick way to evaluate each trick attempt.

· End of Feb/Beginning of March: I read a book by Daniel Coyle called the talent code. It super inspires me.

· Beginning of April:

· April 17th: First 360 pop shovits

· April 23: Began for the first time to practice nollies. Noses like tails didn’t exist when I was a kid.

· April 23rd: First Tre Flip! And then over the next month I landed dozens more.

· April 30: First K-grind.

· May 5, 2012: First time waxing my trucks. Right around here is also the first time I began doing backside Ollies into 50-50s.

· May 6. After almost landing my first few attempts at Casper flips I rolled my ankle.

· May 9. With a slightly sprained ankle I went to Venice Skate Park and dropped in for the very first time.

· May 9th: Trying to run out a bail in the big pool at Venice Park, I landed ten feet down on my heel, same foot as sprain. I either bruised my bone badly, or I actually fractured it.

· May 11. While nurturing my sprained ankle and extremely painful fractured or bruised foot, I switch up my routine of doing drills and trying tech trips. This changes everything, even how I practice after I mostly heal. As I write this, it is about 50 days later and it still hurts sharply when I put pressure directly on my heel.
For the first few weeks after these injuries I practice almost exclusively manuals and nose manuals. These are firsts since childhood.

· Second week in May. Landed first ollie into manual across a manual pad.

· Somewhere in the period in May I also started doing fakie Ollies again. First time since childhood.
• Also somewhere in May I learned 360 frontside no-complies.

· May 26. First sweet backside no comply wall ride.I feel some definite progress in the healing of my heel and I resume Ollies and grinds and old school stuff, continuing to practice manuals after any given painful contact with my heel.

· May 29. First 360 frontside Ollie. Did a bunch off a driveway hip.

· June 9. First manual up onto a manny and across it.

· June 11. First Kickflip up to a manny pad.

· June 16. I break my finger skating the above ledge.

·June 18. First nose manual onto and across a manny pad.

·June 23. First boardslide across two picnic table seats. Pictured on top. Also, first time skating with an old friend, first Ollies down stairs, first ollie over gap to sidewalk.

·June 23. Broke another finger while practicing the above mentioned boardslide. Two broken ring fingers, one pissed wife.

·June 26. Baldwin Skate Park. First time really loving carving around and creating lines on transition in a SkatePark. I’d loved Venice, but was only in the big pool, and didn’t really get to use the snake run much. At this park,I had it alone and was loving moving around the entire park doing entire runs of carves, grinds and ollies without ever having to push off. Sounds small, but it was huge to appreciate the pyramids and quarter pipes, etc.

· June 26. First Kickflip up an incline onto a pyramid.

· July 1. First Varial Flip on an incline/ramp at the park.

· July 6. First time skating in a natural drainage ditch in the mountains. Bronson ditch, by the Hollywood sign.

· July 11. Really feel like I got the feeling for backside 180 Ollies for the first time since childhood. Maybe better than when I was a kid. This will open up backside tailslides eventually.

· July 18. First frontside Popshovits. “Front shove”.
· July 20. First heelflip.
· July 23. First Rolling Tre Flip.
· July 23. First backside tailslide.

July 30. Third trip to a doctor/hospital since I began skating again. From a fall six weeks ago, fractured finger. Blood test in case it’s infected inside. Doctor says no skating.

•August 2. First Fakie Kickflips
•August 2. First 180 Backside kickflips.

• August 8. First half-cab kickflip
• August 9. First shovit out of a nose manual. First anything out of a manual.
• August 16. Fortieth birthday. Whoa. I really am an old dude skating. I feel young.
• August 26. X-rays show I have a finger fracture with a bone fragment jamming into my knuckle. Follow-up, maybe surgery required.
• August 28ish. Some douche bag steals my $600 Galaxy phone, ending for a long time my era of selfie videos and stills. My new phone barely documents the spots.
• September 2. First snapped board (ollie) while skating.
• September 9. Hired as a stunt skateboarder on The Mindy Project (Fox TV). Selected from video, beating out over 100 other submissions! What!?
• September 10. Kind of a milestone. First old school session off a wall since the 80s. Boneless and Wall crawl to invert.

• September 28. First slappies.
•September 29. First Fakie 180 Frontside Ollie.
• September 29. First Fakie Manual.
• October 5. First Fakie Frontside 180 No Comply.
• October 7. First No Comply Impossible.
• October 11. First Fakie Frontside 360 Ollie.
• October 17. First Frontside 180 Kickflip
• October 17. First Fakie Varial Flip
• October 23. First Fakie Heelflip
•October 26. First kickflip ever into a curb trick. It was a backside kickflip to rear axle stall.

Backside kickflip into axle stall. First night ever making this trick.

• November 5. First kickflip into a grind
• November 15: 270 No Comply to tail stall (not slide):
• 270 Frontside Ollie to tail stall (not slide)
• November 18. Varial Flip to axel stall.
• November 24. First decent fakie ollies into backside tailslides.
• November 25. First tricks out of grinds. 9 or 10 foot frontside 50-50s to nollie shove it out.
• December 8, 2013. First nose manual across a manual pad to shovit out.
• December 8, 2013. Overhauled the way I practice. Turned my “drills” into “games” instead.
• December 9, 2013. Big personal day. Not getting into it here. Let’s just say this was the first day of the rest of my life.
• December 28. Tre Flip Breakthrough. After a month of not landing tre flips, but trying constantly, I am surrounded by a group of 12 to 14 year olds and they teach me the best tips I’ve ever learned to increase my tre flip abilities. I begin landing a higher percentage than ever of rolling tre flips! This was a key day in my adult skating life. Thank you, kids! Here’s more of their tips.
• January 7, 2014. First 360 backside shovits. (Not popshovits. I do those occasionally by accident, but never intentionally…yet).
• January 7. First Backside Nollie popshovits in practice. I had sort of retained these from childhood, but never really tried them since I got back on board.
• January 18. Broke a bone in my foot. Thus begins the biggest non-skating period since I began to relearn how to skateboard. One month. I smacked it while landing a ton of tre flips. Yet within 11 days I’m sort of cruising for commute, just doing manuals. Even after I resume skating a month later, the pressures of life and wife – mixed with the pain of the recent small fracture or break, take the wind out of my super-pushing-myself-to-acheive-on-a -skateboard-sails.

• Feb 8, 2014. Landing my first few flip tricks again after a 20 day trick hiatus.
• Feb 11, 2014. I start landing tre flips again, after the foot break. But skating is still painful, and all my jobs and meetings combined begin taking up 80+ hours per week. I’m so exhausted and even a bit depressed about it all, and I sleep 5 or 6 hours a night instead of skating an hour and sleeping only 4 to 5 hours per night. The Dark Ages of relearning to skate have begun. But I still do manuals on the way to the store.
•  April 18-ish, 2014. I started getting nose manuals across pads, getting out of them straightforward without having to do a shovit. I also land my first quality tre flips in front of a camera. Pleased to archive it no matter what happens next.

Tre Flip!

• May 2014. Learned a bunch of new tricks, combining other thing I’ve learned (but didn’t specify the actual date in my notes):
• Frontside nollie popshov (I was already doing backsides)
• Fakie backside 360 shovit
• Backside no-comply popshov
• Fakie frontside pop shovit
• Fakie backside popshovit.
• June into mid-July: Another skate drought. Ugh. I’m still suffering payback from the year before when I blew off work for almost the entire year (and skated), and dug myself into a hole. Plus, I’m working on a few programs and am constantly in meetings. 80+ hours per week. Also, as per my post just before this blackout phase, I lost some of the fun of skating when I got too obsessed with getting better at tre flips faster. Fucking Tre Flip. I didn’t post for 3 months, but I kept cruising, doing manuals, grinds, bombing hills.
• July, 2014. Not posted on the blog until months later. I visit my family back east and in Chicago. I visit skateparks with my skater nephews (I have four of them, the older is 14 at the time). One of my nephews has a mini ramp in his yard. I get the most practice I’ve had on transition since my childhood. I relearn grinds and rock and rolls on the ramp, and I get early grab frontside air in the mini-ramp. I also use the side of a quarter pipe to get air, both backhand grab and method airs.

• September, 2014. For my entire life my Aunt has been telling my I have to meet her best friend’s son. She’s always said we have a lot in common. Finally, after 30 years I call him. He happens to live a few blocks from my business in Hollywood. He’s about 5 years younger than me (so, not a young kid, but also very youthful and agile), and still skates! We meet each other and it’s the first time I have an actual 2 hour skate session in many months (not counting the skate parks over the summer). Now, with an extremely enthusiastic, non-judging and playful skate buddy, my original obsession to skate returns. The skate dark ages are over! I skated solitary for the entire life of this adult phase so far, but now I’ve got a total bro, and it has reignited the spark!
• October 5, 2014. No comply to 5-0 grind.
• October 16. Fakie 180 backside heelflip
• October 17. 270 No Comply to boardslide
• October 20. Fakie flip to boardslide
• October 25. Begin the new skill of relearning how to skate “lines”, trying to pull of a sequence of tricks while moving and being filmed. Totally different than just mellowing and trying something isolated with full focus and a slow roll.
• October 29. 270 No Comply to tail slide

Note: in the last couple of weeks, by Nov 17, I’ve gotten fakie fronside no comply big spins; fakie frontside big spins and fakie backside big spins. I’ll bullet point them with the actual dates later.