October 9, 2019
The first time I ever tableskated I did many things wrong and had some major mind blowers not to mention some seriously crazy insomniactic excitement disorde the night before. Plus I think my endurance increased by 20%. In this article I will explain everything I learned from my first encounters with the nature of tableskating. "Tableskating is impossible!" I think it is easier to land a kickflip on a regular skateboard regular skateboarding 10 times in a row then to land 1 silly little finger something flip while tableskating. "Oh the conjecture!"
That said, I would like you to also know that tableskating is quite frankly every little boys dream come true. I think tableskating in competition should be performed with traditional regular non-motorized skateboards but practiced with some type of gas or electric powered skateboard simply because sprinting for hours a day is just crazy to imagine for a person to have to do. All I can say is that you can't go fast enough when tableskating. Each new sprint feels slower than the last and before you know it you're lying on the ground gasping for air. I ran so fast and so hard that my ribcage started poking out of my shirt. I would say that tableskating is like 220 times harder than regular fingerboarding on a stationary table. The reason I said 220 times is because on average, I would be traveling at a little over 27 miles per hour and since a tableskater is roughly 8 times smaller than the skateboard beneath my feet (e.g. 27 X 8 = 216mph), it would be like trying to shoot a bobblehead mounted on the dashboard of a high powered muscle car going 90 on a highway with a .38 stubnose revolver from a chopper going slightly quicker in the same direction then hitting Mr. Bobbles again after the muscle went dukes of hazard. The fact that my stationary fingerboarding has a completion ratio of about 27% on my worse day, truly concerns me because that would imply that my tableskating would have an overall complition ratio of about 0.16% on a similar day... Ouch. And I was sure that it would atleast be easier than regular skateboarding, NO!NO!NO! Erroneous! Erroneous! Erroneous! Forever Erroneous! I was however correct in thinking that regular wood and plastic fingerboards would fail gloriously! For some crazy reason I thought doing regular stance flip tricks would be easier but again me and my stupidity rained on till the end of that day, and had to slowdown to a crawl just to be able to do them. Tableskating in short is not fingerboarding or fingerboarding or what ever you want to call it. Tableskating is a whole new animal that the universe has up until now regurgitated all over me at the frontier of a new miraculous and wonderful journey, and just when I thought fingerboarding couldn't become any harder for me I find myself at the starting line of a completely new race; the race to become the best tableskater the whole world has ever seen.
It was funny when people driving through my neighborhood thought that I was having a garage sale or something given all of those nice tables lined up along the side of my driveway. Some guy even thought I was gonna ollie my regular skateboard on to them and wanted to see me fall, but as soon as he saw me tableskating he soon drove off. If only he would have waited 5 minutes because that's how long it was until I fell from the first time trying the tableskate.
The first time I ever tableskated I think I set the tableskating tables too high, but I'm not exactly sure... The chore of having to setup the tableskating tables and then put them away was not as bad as I thought it would be. Getting the ends of the tables to connect with perfect flushness was difficult but certainly managable with a little patients and lots of sugar packet shims. I used clear box tape to create a final bridge between each inline table connection gap. Each table junction however can stir up some serious problems during the launch or landing stages of any tableskating trick you maybe trying to perform. A good way to mitigate this issue is to add more tableskating tables to your overall tableskating table. I think that five 8 foot long tableskating tables should be enough. This will give you more time to setup each trick to give you the best shot at completing each individually attempted tableskating maneuver. The tableskating tables I used were actually just Medium Density Fiberboard (MDF) cut with a standard miter saw and had some pretty sharp 90 degree edges which of course scored my hands continuously during my initial tableskating lessons.
I thought tactips would be better than 120 grit because of all of the extra air bypass, but have far more success with the 120. Although the griptape seemed to be the better of the two during my first hours of the thing, looking back... I still for some reason feel deep inside that tactips tableskating can work with optimal timing which can only be achieved with hundreds if not thousands of hours fine tuning it.
What a mysterious day to say the least. It was like being King Kong or Godzilla, surfing a super mega apocalyptic tidal wave with an aircraft carrier along the side of an extra wide six lane suspension bridge while driving a school bus with enormous monster fingers end to end.
What incredible new risky business!