Transition in my words

So it was coming close to the end of the Summer in 2007, Christmas had passed, the weather was cooling fast and my work load was increasing faster than ever. The summer seemed to pass as if it hadn’t started and what I had planned didn’t seem to eventuate. I ticked a lot of boxes this summer however I caught very few waves.

When I stopped Snowboarding full time in 2003, it wasn’t a problem as I had the opportunity to Surf and keep active moving sideways and doing the things I loved.

Come the end of summer 07 it seemed that this was not proving overly true. I needed to do 2 things, 1 = Surf more and 2 = find an alternative.

I made the trip up to the Gold Coast for the Quiksilver Pro for work and one night some close friend of mine, Sam DeKauwe, Mason Rose and I ducked over Sam’s friends place for Dinner… to my surprise, 2 things happened. The first, I found my new found love and the second, which came about 45 seconds afterwards, I realized fast that it wasn’t going to be an easy relationship to adjust to.

Sam’s mate had built a skate ramp in his garden, a 4” x 8” wide ramp… no more than 3 weeks old. In my haste, thinking I was 16 again, I made some awkward turns and bit it pretty hard. Pro Skater Trent Bonham had joined us for dinner so we had a bit of a preview of what it looks like to rip a ramp apart without any effort and it was certainly great to watch.

The next week I went and saw my mate Kye Fitzgerald at his Mona Vale store Raised By Wolves and he decked me out with a new skateboard, helmet, pads, all the gear for a punter ready to get back into a young mans sport at the age of 32.

I was quite an experience re educating myself about the fear of doing something relatively new and whilst I can snowboard and surf quite well, to ride a Skateboard, on concrete with an Ant Farm of kids running a muck around you is quite an experience. It leaves little room for error, plenty of which I encountered (errors that is).

I decided to make the Monster Skate Park in Homebush Sydney my new home and I set myself a goal. They have a 14” ramp/ half pipe and it is one of the best in Australia (See illustration left) and I decided that i would ride this as often as I could, role the walls and get a feel for what its like to drop in from 14”. I gave myself a time frame to get used to transitioning and start to get into the vertical section of the wall from a rolling start.

This took some time but after many hours of pumping my legs and major leg burn I started to get into some serious heights on the ramp, mastered the front and backside turns and within 6 months, I was was riding the ramp with confidence and getting to around 10” on the vertical.

Something amazing happened to me at this time and it was an experience that I actually find quite hard explaining to people when i share it.

You see I was doing this on my own, my mates had no interest in joining me on this journey, however my kids would come a lot and my wife Nicola would drop in and watch the kids whilst I rode ramp… it was great fun and the kids enjoyed it a lot. What happened during this period was quite an experience and in a way changed my life. When i started skating again, I did it to in a way revisit my youth, stay young in a sense but what i found was myself continually challenging myself to go higher, better faster and the feeling that eventuated was quite a spiritual one.

I can not explain what it feel like, to roll up a wall to a vertical position, turn 180 degrees and at a particular point in that moment, you are horizontal to the earth, hovering above the ground with nothing holding you in place and no real rhyme of reason offering up any sense or sensibility as to how I wasn’t going to just fall out of the sky, instead what happens is your body swings into position, all points of movement aligning to bring the board, my feet, body and shoulders to roll the board back down to do it all again 10 seconds later.

I must admit, I haven fallen, a lot, but in time, it has all fallen into place and I continue to work towards dropping into the 14” pipe of which I have not yet accomplished… but I will.

Its a lot like business, we set goals, we work hard achieving them, we fall, we get up, we fall we get up and in between we are offered up experiences and moments that we cannot exchange for many other experiences in life, however brief, the small moments and the victories for the right reasons are the compelling reasons we exist. To overcome, to grow, to challenge ourselves and be good, honest and achieve what we set out to say we will… however long it takes…

The Transition between this place and the next, the transition between horizontal and vertical doesn’t “just happen”, there are things in between that makes us transition from one place to another for a reason… we just need to make sure we are doing the right things in that time that gives us that amazing feeling or victory over ourselves, each other or life that makes us want to do it all over again 10 seconds later.

Happy skating.

by Ben Rennie

This entry was posted on Sunday, April 26th, 2009 at 1:30 pm and is filed under THE WHITE ROOM. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.