The Promised Post

So, I promised you a post about dropping in, so that those of you who have know idea what it is can have some idea of how awesome I am. Additionally, it's 7:30 on a Saturday morning, and I can't sleep in because I'm a teacher, but I definitely don't feel like diving into my grading yet, either. This gives me the perfect time to blog.

So, dropping in. Dropping is a pretty essential skill for a skateboarder. Without it, what you can skate is severely limited. However, everyone I've ever talked to was scared to death when they first learned to drop in. I was no exception. What I was was old enough that I could ignore the peer pressure and put off learning to drop in for a very long time. Teenagers don't have the luxury of being afraid in front of their friends, so they are constantly hucking themselves and their boards off new drops and trying new tricks and hurting themselves. Because of this, most teenagers are also much better skaters than I am, since I content to roll around in my comfort zone for quite some time before trying something new--if it's not too scary.

Dropping in is hard to explain if you don't know what coping is, so here's a picture to illustrate:

http://www.bmx-zone.com/articlePic.php?id=398

The metal bar at the top of the ramp is called coping. Most quarter pipes, half pipes, bowls, etc. all have coping.

http://www.coastalbc.com/skate/photos2007/70212wmw64.jpg

This means that if you can't drop in, you can't get down the ramp or bowl from the top. You'll have to slide down on your rear and then roll around from the bottom, which will both mark you as a total noob and mean that you'll never have enough momentum to go very fast or very high.

In order to drop in, you put your board over the edge with the wheel over the coping but the tail still on the flat part of the ramp. This angles the board up toward the sky. Then, you put your back foot on the tail and one foot up toward the nose, balancing on one foot on a board balanced on the edge of a slope.

http://0.tqn.com/d/skateboard/1/5/L/B/Dropping-In-Ready-Tailset.jpg

Then, in one fluid motion, you lean waaaay out into space and put your foot all the way down to the sloping ramp below. You need to get that board from tail position, with those front wheels hanging out a foot above the ramp, to rolling position, with all four wheels on the downward sloping surface of the ramp. You and the board are going to make a controlled fall more than ninety degrees, almost like a quarter turn on a horizontal axis. At the same time your board starts to move forward and, if you've done it right, you roll down the slope. If you don't lean forward far enough, you'll fall backward and hit the pavement and/or the coping with various parts of your anatomy. If you lean to far forward, you'll fall forward and hit the pavement with various parts of your anatomy, possibly including your face. Keep in mind you'll have all the momentum in your fall you would have had on your board, so you'll be hitting that pavement nice and hard. It's probably gonna hurt. And when you first learn to drop in, that lean into space feels about as smart as throwing yourself off of a concrete cliff riding a plank with wheels on it so that you won't be able to make a stable landing, which is pretty much what you're doing. This is what dropping in looks like if you're cool:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/suffolk/dont_miss/2003/07/bury_skate_park/images/skate_drop_in_270.jpg

http://tumyeto.com/images/uploaded/elijah-drop-in_opt.jpg

This is what dropping in looks like if you're me:

And there you have it. Dropping in. Not really that exciting because everyone can do it, but I'm pretty darn excited that I can finally do it. Now the only problem is that when I drop in I have a lot of speed, and because I've been rolling around and the bottom of things for so long, I don't know how to turn when going that fast yet. So I tend to drop in and either coast till I'm going a comfortable speed or just bail. But bailing while moving that fast is also a risky process, as the scrapes and bruises on my elbows and knees can attest. But, who cares? I can drop in. The rest will come.

This is me looking more cool:

And this is Cuny. My skatecoach and inspiration.