From skates to blades!

Its been a while since I scribbled away to glory.... 22 days to be precise, the longest I have gone without posting anything since I started this blog. Well, its been a pretty hectic few weeks with "product releases" and "deadlines" all over the place so I haven't had much time for anything besides the basic routine stuff and, more importantly, I havent been "observing" stuff (remember my blogs "mission statement" ? :P)

Hmm... well... its the end of the weekend and in keeping with my resolution to try my hand at something new from time to time, I decided to take a shot at ROLLER BLADING yesterday. I used to be a pretty avid roller skater when I was in high school (6th grade tp 10th grade to be precise). I am not sure if I gave it up because roller blading in India (thats where I spent the first 22 years of my life) has always been considered a kids hobby/ sport or because I simply got bored of it. Anyways, its been on my mind for a while to try out this distant cousin of the roller skate ;-). For those of you who are wondering what the difference is, essentially, they both have 4 wheels on each leg but in skates, the wheels are arranged in 2 parallel rows while blades have em all in one single row (kinda like ice skating)

So, before I knew it I and a buddy had spent almost 2 hours roller blading and covered nearly 10 miles on the beautiful Santa Barbara beach. And I enjoyed it so much that I decided to get myself my own pair of blades (I had rented blades for todays "trial run"). The best part was that I didn't suck at it as much as I thought I would. The only part that I thought was a little tricky (and that people had warned me about) was "braking". And this is one important difference between blades and skates - while traditional skates have brakes in the front, and on both legs, in roller blades there is only one brake provided on the rear end of the right leg. I haven't really gotten the hang of braking yet, but I realized that if you look ahead and adjust speed accordingly, you seldom need to use the break. But, I do plan to research into finding the right way!