Naomi in the Skatepark

Part 3 - Fear is a Four Letter Word

Its been a great couple of months! It’s not really been 2 months because I took about a month off in the middle somewhere, due to being a complete girly wuss, but the fact that I went back again so soon is a real turnaround for me.

My initial 3 week stint was completely different from the last 2 weeks, and I’ve learned some valuable lessons about how to keep myself going back.

In the first session I just went and did everything that I had done before. It was like a revision session – air the spine *tick*, air the launch box *tick*, drop in from sitting on the vert *tick*, etc. But I had returned to the ramps with the aim of overcoming my fear of the coping. And I managed to do just that! So quick! Its been years and years, but it happened in the space of about 2 sessions, thanks to the help Monte gave me last summer, the help and support of Louise who taught me to 180 to stall, and my stalling about 30 times in one session. That really helps – just the repeating of a trick over and over again, just like in freestyle. I cannot properly express the feeling of achievement I had on the way to the pub that night – you really have to go and overcome one of your own deep set fears to understand it. I just kept on smiling, and drank a whole pint at the pub. Yes I did.

Don’t get me wrong, I still have a healthy fear of coping, but not the irrational panic inducing horror that I got every time I went within 10cm of it, as before.

Over the next couple of weeks I visited the park 2-3 times a week and just focussed on frontside & backside stalls & grinds on the mini, and then front & backside stalls on the midi. The midi I found much more frightening though, and the mini began to feel like a an old comfy armchair by comparison – but as always, I felt I should be pushing myself to the next trick every time I came to the park, always having to overcome fear a step more than the last time in order to feel that I hadn’t let myself down by letting my fear win.

That was my big mistake, and has been over the years – I’m a complete wimp – I ride ramps as a way of overcoming my fairly sensible fear of damaging myself, and so I overcompensate and take it a step too far. I never let myself get used to something. The minute I could hobble over the spine, I had to be airing it the next session. The minute I had dropped in to the vert 3 times from sitting, I had to do it standing the next session. They bring a double decker bus out at the Bladercross and what did I do? Convinced myself that if I didn’t still do it then I was a slave to fear. “If I don’t do it now, I never will” was what I said to myself before each new thing.

And so I maimed myself. On the mini, doing some 180 to grind (either backside or frontside, but I don’t know which is which) I tabled in the air and landed across the coping, on the side of my left thigh. I hate those falls when you can’t move for pain on the bottom of a ramp – everyone is waiting for you to move out of their way so they can have a go, but you cant. There is no movement happening here. And there is complete silence too – you can’t speak for the pain. The only things you can manage to do as you pray for the pain to go are (a) feel utter shame at being a girl on the ramps, getting in the way, and (b) give a thumbs up sign to indicate that you’re basically ok.

Fortunately on this occasion the skateboarders that I was sharing the ramp with honoured my request to ignore me and skate around me, and a few minutes later I managed to drag myself off the ramp and sit down. The leg was completely dead though, and this confused me. The best remedy, as always, was clearly to get up and give it another go. Um… no. This failed to bring the leg back to life and resulted only in me looking really stupid. It was like having a piece of dead wood attached to my hip – completely unresponsive, though it did shoot searing pain through my body every time I tried. I had to hobble on crutches to the party I was due at that night, but at least I felt a little hardcore.

I returned two days later, and it was a real no no. My leg was pretty functional again, and I had a very impressive bruise to show my friends, but my leg had colluded with my fear reflex and I had a really hard time wanting to do anything. I decided to try again in a couple of days, but instead succumbed to meals out, movies in, walks into town etc for the next month – even doing the washing up was more appealing to me then beating myself up at the skatepark.

But a month later, Tony Hawk came to town… He was doing a demo at the skatepark to promote his new computer game. I was so excited. I was like a small child at Christmas. I’d only ever seen him skate twice on TV, but it was more what he stood for than what he actually did on a ramp – he was just some kid who had been given a skateboard and just done the same trick over and over until he got it, and kept at it for years and years, and now he’s over a decade older than me and still pushing it in one of the most physically punishing sporting environments. What a God. Sometimes I think I’m great because I spent about 12 years doing the same freestyle trick over and over until I got it, and have seen some success, but I’m pretty off and on, and keep using my age as an excuse for not going to the skatepark or doing such stupid stuff anymore – I haven’t ridden stairs for what must be about a year now. So after an hour of pretending to be an official photographer so I could remain at the top of the vert ramp, I went home to collect my skates and return that evening.

That night I decided to stop pushing so far out of my comfort zone – from now on, if I didn’t want to do anything, I wouldn’t, and my success criteria would just be the fact that I turned up to the skate park – even if I didn’t do much at all.

That said, I did so my first handplant at the top of the vert. I’m not entirely sure how this fits in with the above sentiment, but it was almost as if, for the first time, I was doing something new because I wanted to – and not simply because I was scared of doing it. I woke up the next day with an immoveable neck from the whiplash from a fall the previous evening, but managed to get an appointment with my osteopath the same day so I was back on the ramps a few days later. My osteopath is pretty used to me now… My theory is that since I’m earning money from skating, I should allocate a certain portion of it to mending the body that I repeatedly break doing it. Another reason she gets so much repeat business from me is that she is the first therapist I’ve had that understands that I don’t like being told not to skate, so only bans me if its completely out of the question.

Over the next few sessions all I did was chill out on the vert & was content only drop from sitting – I know I can drop-in from standing, but don’t feel the need to prove it to myself anymore. Sometimes I wouldn’t get as good as I was the previous session, but that didn’t matter because I had already achieved by turning up and riding.

I haven’t actually made such a turnaround, and I do still feel like I need to progress, but its in a much less self punishing way than before.

Naomi's website: http://www.skatefreestyle.com/

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