I was fourteen and already past my prime rollerblading years, so I’d spent every summer just throwing myself off of the pavement and onto the nearest lawn whenever I wanted to slow down.
How Old Were You When You Learned How To Use The Brakes On Rollerblades
I never learned to roller-blade well! I don’t think I ever used the brakes properly. Quads 4 lyfe, etc.
Yup, when we went on field trips to the Skate Ranch in 1st – 4th grade, it was the early 90s, still firmly in the era of roller skate dominance. Also firmly in the era of “Who gives a fuck about things like helmets or kneepads.” These field trips taught me lessons about how to internally regulate physical pain that have served me ever since.
is skate ranch a super common name for skating rinks? there was one in my hometown (lubbock, tx) that we had like weekly “school nights” at in my elementary school. i mainly went during the latter part of the 90s when the kids who had to rent four-wheeled skates were seen as “uncool” and not having roller blades was certain social death.
Me toooooo. I can neither roller blade or ice skate but I am killer on 4-wheels.
I never did. I just gradually slowed myself down and took a few extra laps around the rink, or hurled myself onto the ground. I tried using the brake once and flew backwards, and never tried it again!
Are the brakes the rubber things on the toes? Or is there some other sort of mechanism?
The only way I ever learned to stop when ice skating was to direct myself into the rink wall. (Luckily this was southern California, where there was no danger of skating on any surface that didn’t come in a rink.)
Also, did anyone else go from rollerblading to roller skating and discover that the first skill does NOT automatically transfer into the second? I was all “whatever I got this,” and then WOMP WOMP turns out I have no idea how to roller skate.
See for me it was/is the opposite. I can roller skate like a champ. Roller blades = instant chaos and death
I broke my tailbone while hosting my kids’ 9th birthday party at the rollerrink. Sat back to activate rollerblade brakes—bad idea! I used all my acting skills to get through that birthday party!
For my rollerblades there was this thing on the back of one of them. You had to kind of flex/straighten your foot a little and that would push it down. Like this!
Or I think you could sort of drag one foot sideways but that seemed like a more advanced move.
I had a roller-rink birthday party when I turned 10, because I didn’t know how to skate and thought it would be a fun way to learn.
One broken wrist (mine!) and 4 hours at the ER later…
They had brakes? *sigh*
There are brakes on rollerblades?
my EXACT reaction. the last time I skated I broke my wrist because some jerk grownup pushed me over rather then give me a high-five.
(I have broken that arm twice, in the same leisure centre)
I’m almost 50. I’ve never done that new-fangled roller-blade thing. Skating is meant to be done in roller skates on wood floors in a darkened and heavily air conditioned building with a disco ball hanging from the ceiling. And then you eat nachos and twizzlers.
You never need to learn how to brake! Just skate slowly and grab the sides!
I am 46 and I have lived through many forms of roller skating. I could practically write a social history of roller skating.
I learned to skate on key skates – the kind you put on over your shoes and adjust with a key thing. My best friend and I skated in my basement and came up with elaborate skating routines on our sidewalk when I was 7 or 8.
Then I got actual roller skates – I distinctly remember breaking my arm roller skating on our neighbors driveway when I was like 10 or 11.
Preteen / early teen me skated in roller rinks to top 40s music, hoping someone cute would talk with me and that I wouldn’t accidentally split my extremely tight (but fashionable!) designer jeans.
I bought roller blades and protective pads sometime in my mid 20s and careened around misc local parks with my friends.
when you say “use the brakes” you mean “step off the sidewalk into the grass” right
I could sometimes use the rubber ones on the back of the skate. All the skates I’ve owned since I was twelve have the ones on the front, which I still can’t use.
I’m really good at drifting to a stop.
I have never rollerbladed. But I have observed that rollerbladers often stop like hockey players, by turning a skate sideways, rather than using the brake. Or maybe that’s just Canadian rollerbladers?
I have definitely seen people do it, but I never tried it myself. I occasionally attempted the brake on the back of the skate, but I mainly stuck with the hurl myself onto the grass method.
I could never figure that out. I also knew people who could stop by pointing their toes away from each other (like 2nd position in ballet) and spinning in a tight circle, which is some kind of wizardry as far as I’m concerned.
I accidentally learned how to do this while trying to figure out the one-foot stop above! Like, I put my back foot down sort of sideways as an experiment and just… inexplicably started whirling around? (It occurs to me that it might be useful to learn how to stop without doing the baffled-ice-tornado impression.)
I have definitely seen that. I think that’s another thing that hockey players do, though they only spin until they’re facing the direction they want to be facing.
Roller derby looks like the coolest thing ever. The amazing pun names. The punk butch goddesses. The violence.
…why can’t there be an equally bad-ass thing for the less coordinated?
Competitive knitting derby? It somehow involves jousting with knitting needles, and the loser gets turned into a spider.
Poetry SLAM. It’s basically wrestling, but with poetry?
Bad-ass bakeoff? People cheer for people who bake nice cakes and explore their hidden feelings and insecurities in a supportive environment, tush learning that accepting who you are is the most bad-ass move of all. Costumes encouraged.
You’re right, GBBO *does* need to start doing a themed costume portion.
Mel and Sue would really get into it. (I’m picturing cake hats.)
Competitive knitting? Worked for Revolutionary France!
Please say more about this.
Well, okay, to be fair, it wasn’t exactly “competitive,” except in the sense of “anyone you can implicate/kill, I can kill faster”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tricoteuse
BTW tush should be just. Typos are weird.
I would like my tush to learn a few things – and “accepting who you are” might be the top choice
Can I refer you to the Chaps Olympiad? With particular reference to Not Playing Tennis and Jousting with Umbrellas on Bicycles http://www.thechapolympiad.com
“The needles are ready! Will you stitch…or need stitches!? It’s TIME! TO KNIT!”
“I say unto you in the words of my uncle…”
No, I’ve been rolling nonstop for sixteen years. Someone please help.
I thought the rink walls were the brakes!
god. despite my parents’ best efforts, I was always too much of a klutz and a coward to ice or roller blade. my relationship with my body is really negative? a friend once described it as “a man with a villain’s moustache living in a mountain a hundred miles away watching it with an ultra-powerful telescope who asked, ‘what strange things can I do to this creation today?” which is a) extremely true and b) extremely weird as a thought for a biological essentialist
My rollerskates had automatic brakes on them that went down to scrape on the ground if you pushed your leg forward and down. In summary, never.
I know how in theory, but my preferred method of stopping (since I was like six) has been to just crash into the wall of the roller rink.
See also: ice skating.
hang on do rollerblades have brakes!?!?
also friends I am going on vacation to the BEACH this week and I got a cheap netbook and am going to use it to write a novella or a novellette I think
Good luck!
Rollerblading – brake by (a) grabbing a low wall or (b) flinging self onto lawn, missing and ending up with road rash
Skiing – crash into cheery corpulent gentleman, rendering him less cheery the more times you have to do it.
Water-skiing / wind surfing – let go of thing of holding, fall over
Surfing – never manage to stand up
Ice-skating – grab wall of rink or flail until you somehow find yourself sitting on the ice with a sore tailbone.
Skateboarding – either kick-flip and somehow hit self in face with board, or jump off and let the board go on
Note: I am in possession of all the grace of a baby rhino (maybe less, come to think of it) so while these methods have served me well, I do not recommend them for others.
In answer to the question…not yet, probably never.
Note to self: if I ever try skiing, make sure to look out for cheery corpulent gentlemen on the slopes. (Maybe I should encourage my boyfriend to gain weight so he can function as a brake.)
In a weirder phase of my youth, I was super into x-treme rollerblading, wherein the skates are specifically designed to not have brakes. I braked by just dragging one foot perpendicularly behind the other. I don’t know if I ever knew how to use the brakes on normal rollerblades.
That’s how I braked with normal rollerblades because the one time I tried to use the brake square thing I got a terrifying trip sideways into the concrete for my troubles. It’s just so much easier your way!
Never rollerbladed, but my braking with roller and ice skates is falling on my ass 3 seconds after I put them on.
Ha, “learned”. I never did. I knew the theory of it, but the thought of having to tip my foot backwards sounded awful; how do you keep from falling over backwards?
Weirdly, I was always much better at ice skating than rollerblading; I was never any good at rollerblading, but with skating I could speed around really fast and hardly ever fell over. (Couldn’t brake doing that either, though. I just skated into a wall and grabbed it.) Unfortunately, in my first week at university I fell over skating, buggered up my knee (still not right, years later) and have been too scared to ice skate ever since.
“Brakes” is short for “find the least spiky looking shrubbery and run headlong into it”, right?
(I could kind-of brake with roller skates. Got rollerblades when I was in college, never tried to use them outside the apartment complex I lived in at the time.)
I wore out many a rubber brake on my rollerblades. The hill leading down from the corner store where I would meet my friend to buy and then immediately consume $5 worth of 5c candies was STEEP, there was no option.
This put me in good stead to take up ice skating while living in Ottawa as an adult – rollerblading is a good translation to ice skating.
The problem came when I tried, without thinking, to slow down by tilting my foot backward. I guess I stopped, but not exactly in a controlled way.
Since then, I’ve learned to stop by dragging one skate perpendicularly behind me. It’s nice when you’re skating on the canal and there aren’t really walls to stop you (or there are, they’re just bordered by piles of snow and lumpy ice that are more likely to make you fall than stop). APPARENTLY you can also do this on rollerblades, but I have never tried, having switched to biking for my human-powered urban jaunts long ago.
I don’t know how to roller-blade.
Or use regular roller skates.
Or ride a bike.
Or basically do anything that requires the bare minimum of balance.
I don’t know how to do the first two things either! Solidarity. Though I did learn how to ride a bike two years ago, in my twenties, and I gotta say – I think it’s *so* much easier to learn as an adult and I’m glad I didn’t keep trying as a kid. It was petrifying at first but then shockingly easy. So, if you want to learn, I’m sure you’d get it fast.
I’ve been thinking of, for health and exercise and all that. We’ll see 🙂
There are some really great guides out there for learning as an adult that are worth looking up. The basic thing is that you put the saddle all the way down and take off the pedals, and then just take yourself to a grassy area with a really gentle slope, and get used to balancing in a place where you can just slowly coast and there’s a soft-ish landing and you can put your feet down, then you learn to use the hand brakes, then you learn to pedal. At some point you pedal in an empty parking lot or equivalent, and then you raise the saddle to its proper height (which means learning proper mounting/dismounting).
It sounds intimidating, but lots of adults get it in a few days.
I think I know how to ride a bike in theory, but a friend let me try hers and it definitely didn’t look or feel like I knew how to ride it in practice. I’m right there with you.
I never learned how to ride a bike either, which makes my username here appropriate on multiple levels.
I love my bicycle, and I ride everywhere, but I’m convinced that if I hadn’t learned as a child I never would have as an adult, because I tried to learn roller skating and ice skating as an adult and NOPE, as I am a klutz.
As it is, despite ten years now of riding a bicycle nearly daily, and thousands of miles of long-distance riding, I fall off my bike approximately once or twice a year. Usually I just get some bruises and mild scrapes and only really injure my dignity.
My preferred braking method for roller blading is generally to stop accelerating and make a slow, tight J-turn, thus arresting my momentum. I’m aware of the rubber things, but they lack grace.
This is the best method. Least risky and looks the coolest.
I used to rollerblade miles every day after work when I was 22-23. Once went 12 miles. Once went down a hill that was big enough that I literally coasted for a mile afterward. The first time I got on rollerblades, though, my ex wiped out in front of me, I flipped over him, hit a tree upside down, richocheted back over him into another tree, and landed next to him on my back. I maintain that it was all his fault! People ran across the street to see if I was ok. I was fine (was wearing full safety gear setup). Why I thought it was a good idea to continue the hobby after that I will never know.
I had the rollerblades that had brakes at the back on both feet. I was so upset when they started giving you only one brake per pair.
Man, he’s terrible even when he’s not trying to be.
Like eight or ten? Though I enjoyed the “throw oneself onto the lawn” method more because it got the adrenaline pumping. So dangerous.
I remember I’d ask for a dollar from my mom and then rollerblade to the nearby gas station to buy a candy bar. There was a very steep (though short) hill where I exited the sidewalk to take a bike trail; that was always very fun to roll down. Clambering up it, not so much. Good times.
I employ the T-stop aka hockey stop method. Wears out the wheels faster, but it works. The “brakes” installed on inline skates are useless.
Wait, for me a T-stop is when you put a single foot perpendicular to your other one and lean back onto your outside edge, and a hockey stop is when both feet go sideways at once. Which one do you use?
Second question: how on earth do you do this on wheels, except by dragging one foot behind you, with your inside edge (or the rollerblade equivalent) down? In my experience, due to the much higher static friction of pavement vs ice, trying to stop on the “outside edge” of rollerblades resulted in the rollerblades stopping and the rest of me remaining in motion!
Oh, and I learned to do that hockey stop on ice skates at age…I don’t know, seven or whenever I started ice skating. But when I bought rollerblades at age 13, my dad wouldn’t let me go anywhere on them without his walking along until I demonstrated that I could stop competently, so I had to immediately learn to transfer the skill.
Those rubber things on the front are not brakes, they are a trick and if you try to use them you just go flying forward onto your face, OBVIOUSLY. WHY WOULD ANYTHING ELSE HAPPEN UNDER THE LAWS OF PHYSICS. Relatedly, the last time I went rollerblading involved me holding an ice cream cone in each hand and slowly starting to roll down a hill towards a canal, unable to use my “grab onto stuff” method of stopping. Eventually I went with the “run into the side of a truck and drop ice cream everywhere” method instead.
I would just roller skate into the nearest wall at the rink, or ~accidentally~ brush into my crush. Nothing brings your wheels/heart to a stop like a cute ten-year-old with frosted tips.
Rollerblades come with brakes? This is new information.
I just managed my momentum and go good at swirling in a circle to stop.
That’s how I stopped a bicycle when I first learned to ride.
That's how I stopped a bicycle when I first learned to ride.
I only ever used quads like a good aspiring roller-derbyist, and they have a totally different system.
So…I’m an inline skating instructor (for realz, certified and everything) and reading this comment section is like, when you read an article and every cell in your body is tell you not to read the comments and you do anyway? That’s what this comment section is like.
Also, heart my quads, only use the damn toe stop when I’m going backwards. If I try to toe stop going forwards, bad things happen.
I grew up in the heyday of the Mighty Ducks, which, where I live, led to an upsurge in rollerblading and roller hockey because ice hockey wasn’t really a thing. Many flying V’s were attempted. We also used to try to leave the roller rink by climb/falling over the wall like ice hockey players. This was very novel to us! I used to take a plastic hockey puck to school to play “foot hockey” (no sticks allowed at school, and a few weeks later, no pucks!) All this to say that I learned how to brake using the ‘make a T with your feet’ method when I was about 7. This didn’t always end well down hills…
Oh you, with your wiles.
Hah, is this one of those trick questions, like when did you learn to fall safely?
I mostly used the slow down and go into the grass method, although I also used the trip over a crack, fall and break your arm method once when I was 10. (Not recommended).
Hah, is this one of those trick questions, like when did you learn to fall safely?
I mostly used the slow down and go into the grass method, although I also used the trip over a crack, fall and break your arm method once when I was 10. (Not recommended).
I am 46 and I have lived through many forms of roller skating. I could practically write a social history of roller skating.
I learned to skate on key skates – the kind you put on over your shoes and adjust with a key thing. My best friend and I skated in my basement and came up with elaborate skating routines on our sidewalk when I was 7 or 8.
Then I got actual roller skates – I distinctly remember breaking my arm roller skating on our neighbors driveway when I was like 10 or 11.
Preteen / early teen me skated in roller rinks to top 40s music, hoping someone cute would talk with me and that I wouldn't accidentally split my extremely tight (but fashionable!) designer jeans.
I bought roller blades and protective pads sometime in my mid 20s and careened around misc local parks with my friends.
Braking on roller blades was basically me flying into the nearest lawn. At roller rinks, it was me careening into the carpeted walls.
never learned to use 'em. i used to stop by grabbing onto lamp posts. then one day i stop rollerblading.
If there was no wall, I did an incredibly awkward version of a T-stop and sort of dragged one of my roller-bladed feet behind me while wobbling precariously on the other foot. This often resulted in me pitching myself into a lawn to avoid bodily harm. Thus it was a long, inefficient way to use the lawn stop method.
"I say unto you in the words of my uncle…"