_TNS Iceland, 9th of July

Its funny how we can convince ourselves that even the most serious of injuries are trivial enough to skate through, have you ever noticed that? A brutal injury mellows out into a dull ache when the absence of skating becomes too much to bear. And so I find myself at Iceland on a Thursday night with my skates, jonesing for the buzz of a good hard skate.

After skating for an hour or two, I took off my skates and picked up my camera instead. Dan took first blood and helped me find a focus point with this negative acid.

Steve Kiley was a very excited man- first session on his new Razor Genesis 7s! Alleyoop Mistrial to break in the soulplates.

Dan came back like it was a game of one-upmanship with a truespin mistrial.

Kevin was having another great skate and stuck this textbook backslide to show all the kids in the park exactly what was up.

Steve wasn’t content to have only skated one side of his new soulplates, so threw down a tweaked negative makio.

Aaron Wheat ate the apple the cool snake offered, and the difference in his skating is obvious- truespin X on lock.

Kevin torqueslides on the opposite foot to his backslide! I never noticed until I just looked at this photo. Most people do it on the same foot like an alleyoop backslide… Props Kevin for doing it the harder, better way.

Benefitting from some work on the hardware of his skates, Taylor has improved by several leaps and bounds since a dremel session in Kevin’s workshop.
Illusion (looking over the wrong shoulder) zero alleyoop makio.

Wheat with a sweatstance. God, I wish I could sweatstance. Thanks for your recent posts, amigo!

Adam Petrov with a fishbrain in some very sexy Deshis.

“Did you get it?” “Not quite, can you do it again please?”
Taylor, Rocket 180. This was the first shot, which turned out the best- rendering the further five attempts pointless. Thanks for jumping anyway buddy!

Stephane’s girlfriend Marie drove Taylor and I out to the park in the afternoon and he joined us when he was done being a professional stuntman for the day… no lie. This was the first of three fishbrains across and down back to back while I fiddled with the settings like the total pro I am.

As I may have said before, I’ve been stoked to see Kevin stepping his game up of late- something to do with 21 weeks?
Here he is captured at the end of a smoothly executed disaster soul.

Half time! Some relaxing.

Stephane with a burly corkscrew lui kang 540 out of the bowled corner.

Dan Lefebre has really helped to push us all in the last month. Just hearing that he’s been out filming in the week is enough to scare us that we’re falling behind! He peer pressures us into feeling like we need to try harder at skating, and its working- keep it up, Dan! HUGE stale grabbed 180 over the ledge.

Steve sure was enjoying those skates! Mistrial.

Ugh… talk about a waste of time. I attempted to get shots of Taylor, Mike D, Stephane and Wheat grinding up this chink rail, and nothing at all came out- except this incredible true savannah up by Taylor. Manual mode and low light are really frustrating.

Choices, choices! What’s a Wheat to do?

See you next Thursday!

-Guy