When you decide to learn how to skateboard there is one trick that everyone must learn, the Ollie. The cornerstone of all skating tricks. Without learning how to ollie, you can forget about every landing all those Kickflips, Heelflips and Tre flips that you imagined yourself doing when you decided to embark on your skating journey. This a little insight into what that journey looked like for me and how I progressed.

Before I move on, as promised in my last skateboarding post here is the setup I decided on. An Element 8.0 deck, element wheels and trucks that came from a component bundle on the Element webstore and some Element Premium bearings. I am no Element fanboy, I just happened to have a huge discount that I wanted to utilize. Here's the deck I purchased. Isn't she beautiful.

You won't see a lot of my setup in this post though because most my learning happened in the couple weeks or so while waiting for my new setup to arrive.

After watching a few how-to ollie videos on the world's best learning site, YouTube, I got pumped and decided I was going to do an ollie right there and then. The physics of an ollie is quite simple and quite complex at the same time, but it all ends up boiling down to popping down on the tail and then sliding your front foot up the board to level out. "I've got this. I know I can do that. They make it look so easy," Confident thoughts. So with my energy up at 1000, I grabbed my cruiser, went into the garage and just sent it. Low and behold I managed to ollie! It wasn't the best or prettiest ollie you'd ever seen, but low and behold I had done one.

Ok, so the first step was down. Now I had to progress and improve them so that I could master this skill that is so fundamental to skateboarding. That however was and is an ongoing battle. Getting good height on my ollie was what I wanted to get to, so I began work on perfecting my pop. (When I talk about the pop, I'm referring to the motion of snapping down on the tail of your board quickly to get it in the air.) I thought to myself that, "If I just pop harder then I will get better ollies." I tried again and again over a period of a few days and found my ollies kept looking something like this.

More pop than before, but not the control and smoothness that I was looking for. After being stuck here for some time it became apparent that my ollies wouldn't have the control I was looking for without two things, proper foot placement and my front foot contributing more to leveling out my board. As you can see in the clip above, my front foot (left) wasn't really levelling out the board. If my left foot didn't level out, then the snappiness of my pop didn't really matter. I'd get in the air, but I wouldn't really have control of myself and the board. The first thing that I needed from my front foot was a slide motion up the board as I popped the tail, and to accompany that I needed good timing in when I performed the slide. This is where I've been for weeks now. Trying to find this perfect timing that will give me consistent and controlled ollies. I've improved greatly and noticed that being comfortable on the board gives you more confidence when you end up trying tricks. That comfort just comes with time and the more I skate, the more comfortable I become. Here's what my ollies look like today.

This isn't the best ollie I've ever done (camera pressure contributed to that) but it shows that I still need to work on my consistency. I've improved in a lot of aspects and do feel like I have more control of the board and myself, and that's the biggest thing. When you want to attain a skill, you must put in the time to hone that skill and master it. The improvement of my ollies doesn't stop here. I keep picturing what they will look like 6 months from now, and that gives me the motivation to continue practicing them. I've moved on to more beginner tricks now such as your BS/FS pop shove-its, BS/FS 180's and even landed my first kickflip recently. Being able to land these tricks is great, and I'm stoked that I've made it this far, but consistency in performing the skill is what I'm after.

I'm not going to go into further detail about those other tricks because that'll be a story for another day, but until then keep up the stamina in your motivation and do what you said you were going to do. I know I will.