“I’m proud of you” – Doesn’t come close
Let me introduce to you one of the most significant students I’ve ever taught. On Instagram he’s @northislandking and his name is Minzaw.
This is him skating backwards at the London Halloween Skate recently. He’s been off-skates for over 5 years and is returning back to his wheels after skating diligently for many years.
He said (many years ago now) he wanted to skate backwards like I did, continuously. He learned all the basics, then backward striding, back curves and then backward crossovers & crossunders.
The last stage in his backwards journey was getting his skills confident enough to do them on London street skates with other skaters around while navigating London road surfaces….there is literally no harder challenge imo.
And here he is, a few sessions back after years off and it’s all still there. The muscle memory is intact, just speed and fluency to add in the weeks to come but technically solid & correct.
I’m so proud of him for achieving this level of skating. But I can’t quite express how much I FEEL watching Minzaw skate backwards. It was in teaching Minzaw that I developed all the progression exercises that make up a combo like back crossover + crossunders. It was on Minzaw that I ‘tested’ those drills and tweaked the problem fixes in real time.
It’s possible that I learned more in our private lessons than he did!
Is skating backwards on your goals horizon?
If so I’ll be posting more backwards inspiration soon.
