Tuesday, June 09, 2015

How (not) to do backrolls


I've been landing backrolls for about a month, but there's still stuff going wrong with them that I'd like to get cleaned up before moving on to more serious tricks. Managed to film 2 interesting failures on Sunday:
1. Popped pretty high and just finished up the rotation way too early. I've done this before, but it's hard to predict exactly how high I'm going to go. It's really dialling in the pop that's the problem, but I could also work on estimating how high I've gone and whether I need to speed up or slow down the rotation.
2. I caught myself moving the bar pretty aggressively after takeoff and tried to correct. Honestly thought I'd looped it, but it turns out I had corrected fine; the kite just happened to head to 12 in a tight send. Not much I could do but keep rotating and eventually landed pretty easily. The kite was too far above to ride away from it, but I was happy to be on back on (in) the water.

 This was the first video I'd seen of my own backrolls and I was hoping they were more of a vertical rotation than other I'd seen. Turns out the pop is quite good and I'm getting enough height to look at more rotations or more twists. I've also been studying Caleb's goto trick and it's really a backroll with tailgrab and landing switch. The height is what makes it look awesome, so I think I'm pretty close.