I’m training for the London Skate next month. It’s a weekly three hour 20 mile skate through central London at night. Marshals block off the roads and the routes cover similar sites like “the Museum Crawl” or “Shopper’s Delight”. A couple of hundred people turn up, with a specialised sound-system on wheels forming part of the event. Almost all people are on roller blades, but I feel much more stable on my quad skates with outdoor wheels, so I will be sticking to these…
I am also planning to do the more tame Sunday Stroll that starts at Notting Hill, as a warm up. And, co-incidentally, will be in the area for the Eastbourne Extreme Sports Festival which features Europe’s only outdoor Roller Derby event over a weekend… as spectator not bouter …
I was contemplating completing the Pari-Roller as part of my break away. Every Friday in summer more than 10000 (yes – no typo – that many zeroes ) skaters start in the hill near Sacré–Cœur in Montmartre and skate a different route around Paris from 10pm to 1am. Scheduling would have meant that I really needed to do this on the second day of my break away and I was just a little too nervous about possible injury to do this. There is an outside possibility of making a special trip to do it at the end, however I would have to really, really enjoy the London Skate to do this …
Adrian Chandler has given me a taste of what to expect in this Go Pro footage from the London Friday Night Skate, that tends to go a bit faster than the Wednesday night one …London Skate 2013 .
Then again, taking all my gear with me means that I will have compromised my proud membership of the “Travelling with Carry-On Luggage Only” cult anyhow, so maybe I may as well take advantage of it. Trying to hire skates would be like trying to run a marathon in running shoes that many, many other people had worn, designed to be hardy and generic, rather than useful to me. So, given that I have the gear, will be kind of in the neighbourhood anyhow, I may just find myself speeding in a crowd down the Boulevards of Paris…
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