Man on wheels

So guess what I did over the weekend? I went rollerblading! Or at least attempted to do so LOL.

Yesterday, my mom suggested that we bring my nephews to UP - they close the academic oval to traffic on Sundays and it becomes a huge park where you have dozens upon dozens of people running, biking, strolling, and even playing badminton. My mom felt that it would be good for us to bring my nephews outdoors and away from the weekend mall scene which is where we usually take them.

Now, when I was a kid, my dad taught me how to roller skate. He had these kid skates which I used and what I did as a kid was just put them on and walk around the garage in them. At some point, I managed to be able to move in them. I'm not sure how old I was when I last put on those roller skates, but it was definitely before I started high school. After that, my only other foray into skating was ice skating in SM Megamall a couple of times when I was in college. I was never good at it, but I enjoyed skating a lot. I also had fairly good balance and rarely fell on my butt. :)

Now way back in 2001, I was assigned in Japan for about half a year to work on a project there. I thought that it would be cool if I brought roller blades with me so I could head down to the park and roller blade there. So I bought these really cool looking roller blades that cost me a few thousand bucks actually. I had never tried roller blading before but I felt that if I could roller skate and ice skate, then I could surely rollerblade.

When I got to Japan, I got so immersed in work - it's the busiest I have ever been for that long a period of time - that during the weekends I ended up just resting. This meant only one thing - in the 5 1/2 months that I was there, I got to use my rollerblades only ONCE! LOL what a waste in investment. I had a lot of fun that one time I got to rollerblade so it sucked that I didn't get to use it more.

My rollerblades just sat in my room for the last seven years. I had been meaning to use them but I never got around to it - usually when I went to UP during the weekends, it was for running. So when the opportunity presented itself last Sunday, I decided to shake the dust off my rollerblades and give it another go.

As expected, I had a lot of trouble finding my balance when I had put them on. But after some time, I started getting better and began moving faster. It also took a while before I gained confidence in skating downslope - the UP acad oval wasn't exactly flat. I rollerbladed (really slowly LOL) for about 45 minutes before we decided to leave. It was a lot of fun, and my nephews did enjoy going to UP so we may just do it a bit more often.