OK, things may have gotten a little out of hand.
9 sheets of downgrade plywood, 10L of white paint and 1 large sheet of thick polyethylene later. I finally have a marked weather resistant skating surface.
Two oddities I never considered:
- Snow blindness. It's white. It's VERY VERY white. Literally painfully white. It's like being on snow. Luckily I own sunglasses.
- Bees. The bees seem to be attracted to the presumably huge amounts of UV being reflected off this.
Anyway. I have been figuring. And slaloming. But mostly figuring. And it's so much fun! Here's my thoughts on figures on inlines:
1. Don't even bother unless you can arrange at least 8mm of rocker.
Artistic inlines I believe have about this built into the frame, but any old inlines will be fine with a 72-80-80-72 wheel setup.
Any less rocker and you can't get enough torque from the cornering rotation to overcome the "lets go straight ahead!" nature of inlines. Or at least I couldn't. Going from 4mm rocker to 8mm rocker instantly fixed many things for me.
2. Shoulder rotation need to be opposite on inlines vs ice.
It comes down to this:
- Inline skates want to go in a straight line
- Ice skates want to go in ever diminishing circles
So, when doing an edge on a 3 meter diameter, on ice you have to force the edge to be
straighter than it wants to be, and on inlines you have to force the edge to be
tighter than it wants to be.
i.e. So, on ice, it's natural that you twist shoulders (with matching arm positions) to face outside the circle when going forwards, and twist shoulders inside when going backwards. Because this is the easiest way to get the hip torque needs to straighten up the curve of an edge.
On inlines however, it's easier if you twist shoulders to face INSIDE the circle when going forwards, and OUTSIDE when going backwards. i.e. the same twist you'd do when executing a 3turn. Which makes sense, given that a 3turn hook is a tightening of the edge. This does mean you're already all pre-twisted up when it comes to actually doing a 3turn, but that seems to be not the end of the world. A quick little untwist before the hook twist seems to be workable.
Don't get me wrong, the muscles employed to tighten a curve are more or less the same ice vs inline, so your instincts aren't going to lead you astray here, it's just that tracing the same curve, on ice you need to straighten it up to hold it and on inlines you needed to tighten it up to hold it.
3. Opposite shoulder twists mean opposite hip positions, which typically mean opposite free foot positions.
How good are your foot-in-front FO3s? You don't have to do these, but they do end up with the free foot in a more useful position for the BI exit curve.
4. Loops are possible, but not nearly as tightly or effortlessly as on ice.
They're definitely not going to happen accidentally, like they seem to on ice. Need to be deliberate and strong.
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So, if you're looking for an off-ice training tool, I wouldn't recommend it as a direct replacement, body positions are quite different, generally the exact opposite of what you'd want to do on ice. That said, the differences are highly enlightening. And it's lots of fun. At least at much fun as figures on ice. Can't beat figures in the warm sunshine, sunglasses on, music playing. Ah what bliss.