Projects: Hybrid
C ruise Power
Power and finesse for cruising boards with street wheel set ups
Project Date: June - August 2002
Skate
Reef
Gear
Surf
History
Non Google Sponsors
Wide slide, frontside
Big board pump
Fakey slide to kickturn
Digital Photography by J. Scott Klossner
Skating and text by Keith Johnson
What Is Cruise Power?
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Cruise Power is what you get when you take a cruising board and soup it up a little. The objective is to be able to put more stress on the board and control it into slides and more difficult footwork tricks.
I took my 54 inch cruiser and put hard street wheels on it. It's still a longboard set up, because the wheels are 68mm. But they are 92 durometer, which makes it much easier to slide. With this set up, many more tricks are possible.
This project is a hybrid of longboard styles that mixes different maneuvers from earlier projects. If you go over the slides and walking tricks covered elsewhere, you'll get the background. On the Reef page, the Layer 1 material in Lines and Arcs material will cover it. I will put the Layer 1 Parts for various routines in the future. If you go through the Walk Chains, which are short routines, that will be a good preparation for this.
This is an advanced longboard skating project. Although the walking footwork from Lines and Chains is a good background for Cruise Power, many of the steps have variations, mostly more difficult variations from what I did earlier. I tried to make these longboard tricks a challenge for myself to perform. If you're having trouble, first try the tricks on a shorter board. Try to work out the individual tricks in the longer routines before putting them all together.
The two main sections in Cruise Power are Wide Slides and Slide Walking. The two styles have a very different feel.
Cruise Power Objectives
Wide Sliding
Wide Slides are stand up slides done on a big board with hard wheels. These are fun but require lots of sliding skill from the skater.
Surf cross training: Wide Slides are really useful if you are a surfer, especially in the performance longboard or shortboard styles, as opposed to traditional longboarding. Cranking off these slides on land will help you bury a rail or throw the tail in the water.
Skateboard cross training: Wide slides will improve your stand up slides on normal skate longboards. The superior technique you need to complete slides on a 54 inch board will serve you well. Once you can wide slide, you can go back to your normal board and have a huge margin of reserve technique. You will be skating two levels below your ability. You can use this margin to add style to your slides, instead of struggling to get them around. This is the essence of how to gain style: skating below your technical level with more creativity.
Also, Wide Slides are impressive. Not many people can do them. It takes dedication, and also the right equipment.
As an offshoot of slidewalking, I include a section on wide stance pumps on the large board. If you can pump this board, you can simulate pumping a short surfboard or medium size longboard with the right arc.
Slide Walking
Slide Walking is a style that mixes walking the board with sliding it around. The slides are done from the nose with a narrow stance. The slides aren't as rad as wide slides, but they are much easier. The emphasis is on style and making it fit into the flow of a walking trick or routine. The hard wheels make it easy to get the board around smoothly and control speed.
Slide Walking is physically easier than Wide Slides, but it's advanced in that the footwork is difficult. Most routines involve either a 180 slide or a body half spinner (or body varial), putting you frequently into switch stance. You need to have your switch stance walking the board down, which is intermediate to advanced footwork. If you're intermediate but don't have complete footwork facility, there are still possibilities if you are creative, because you could take pieces of the routines if you can't do the whole thing.
When you create Slide Walks you can use simple cross steps if that's all you can do. Or you can do like I do and use switch cross steps, back cross steps, fakey walks, foot drags, kicks, spinners, and backwards pushes. You use anything you can think of to get to the nose to do a funky slide, then anything you can think of to get back to the tail. It's a cornucopia of flatboard tricks.
A note about the gear used in Cruise Power
Cruise Power contents
Wide Slides
- Cruise Power Pump. Using a bigger range of motion and solid arm positioning to pump a big board. Set up for a wide slide.
- Frontside Wide Slide. Twist rotation slide technique with wide stance.
- Backside Wide Slide. A blind torque rotation 180 slide.
Slide Walking
It will help to review Reef Layer 1 Lines and Arcs while you're working on these moves.
- Walk up to frontside nose slide. Walk up, frontside arch nose slide, walk to tail.
- Walk up to backside nose slide. Walk up, nose stance, foot drag stall, backside nose slide, walk to tail, fakey frontside slide to kickturn.
- Hand kick to back step. Hand kick to back cross step, backwards push, backwards cross push, half spinner to nose, switch backside twist nose slide.
Cruise Power Walk Chains
Advanced footwork to mix in with slides.
- Spinner to hang heel. High step to spinner, backwards cross half shuffle, hang heel nose perch, half spinner to switch walk to tail.
- Spinner to tai chi nose perch. 270 spinner, leg lift and pivoting nose perch, aft weighted toe tap, pivot half spinner to backpedal.
Once you've got the hang of Slide Walking, you can make up your own routines. Take different footwork that you do to get to the nose. Then perform nose slides using different arm styling, different stances, whatever you can think of to make your tricks different and your own.
Thanks to Gravity for wide slidewalking longboards.
