_Wednesday Night Skate

How many of you have skated recreational skates this summer? Personally, I haven’t been on a pair in over ten years. Yesterday Dave got a set of the new Rollerblade ‘crossover’ skates (the X5s) from Leon at Shop Task along with some RB aggressive frames and the new soulkits.

He showed off his new setup in style last night and I have to say they really suit him and like all RB skates are solid, comfortable and well made. As an added bonus he’d brought along the recreational aluminium frames with 80mm wheels, and seeing as I was desperate to skate them, he let me ride around with them on my skates for a while. They’re not quite the perfect solution I’d expected -switching to them from Fiziks is a lot of work- as you have to take a wheel off of each end to get to the UFS bolts, but ten minutes of work later my Carbons were in their true spiritual home- on top of some badass wheels!

We had a fun skate of the downtown core last night cruising around buzzing security guards and making them earn their paychecks, followed by beers and curb sausage. Downtown Toronto is so pretty at night, its a shame that the spots can be a bust.

_Daytrip to Simcoe

Just YES. Sweatstances don’t get better than no-soulplate-all-cohones Dan Lefebre Sweatstances.

Having never been to visit, when I think of Simcoe I imagine a small town crammed full of death rails, corn fields, bar fights and Mike David. It turns out that the reality isn’t too far from my vision, but with better stuff to skate. Mike David has been putting in quality time behind the wheel recently visiting Toronto four or five times in the last month so we felt it was only fair that we took a drive to his (red?) neck of the woods to see what Simcoe has to offer.

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_Blading Wellness Part 3: Brandon Smith Interview

This is the third part of our series that promotes blading wellness, and ensuring that rollerbladers take care of their body. This time Corey and I sat down with Brandon Smith after the Montreal Classic.

As most of your know, Brandon Smith is an extremely experienced rollerblader. He always seems to have complete control every time he skates.

A recurring theme in our conversation with Brandon was stretching, and how important it is. Most bladers don’t realize how much it can help you to stretch before you skate, and that it’s actually most important to stretch after you skate. Stretching afterwards relaxes all your muscles and prevents soreness the next day. A good 20-30 minute stretch when you get home after a long session will make a huge difference the next day. For more information check out this article on about.com ‘When to Stretch – Why Experts Recommend Athletes Stretch After Exercise’

- Dave

Blading Wellness Part 3: Brandon Smith Interview from RollToronto.ca on Vimeo.

_Shop-Task Re-Design : Interview

I recently noticed the new Shop-Task site re-design, and it thought it looked 100 times better than what was up there before.  Since I am into design myself, I can’t help but think about all the things that go through your mind when a large scale design project goes underway. I caught up with Leon and Aj at Shop-Task to see what their thoughts were.

Q : What were some of the challenges that you found yourself going through during the re-design process?

A: The biggest challenge was to design a new logo. We wanted the logo to be simple, and recognizable but we didn’t want to come up some fancy design that would change our image. Once we had that, the rest of the re-design process was pretty easy. We already knew what we wanted the site to look like.

Q: What did you want to achieve by the new design?

A: We wanted our website to look cleaner, more professional, and easier for our customers. We think with the new design we are able to display our products better.

Q: Blog-Task is extremely popular here in Canada, and it’s important for Shop-Task as well. What were your thoughts when you set that up?

A: Shop Task is a skater owned and operated company and one of our main focuses will always be to promote rollerblading and to help our industry grow. We think that the blog is extremely important to showcase Canadian talent and share it with the rest of the world.

Q: How important is it us, as rollerbladers, to have an online representation of our community?

A: We think it’s extremely important and that’s why we invest so much time, money, and effort into our media. We believe that one central Canadian website with selective content is the key for a proper and professional representation of our community. The outside world doesn’t know enough about our sport and our potential. At the moment the internet is the best tool to show them what we’ve got.

Thanks for the interview Shop-Task.

- Dave