I’ve now seen our current monocultural big-screen spectacular—I speak of Barbie, obviously—twice, and my mind’s still teeming with takeaways: about the punch lines and the costumes and, maybe more than anything, about how it’s ushering in mobs of pink-clad girls (and plenty of plus-ones, BFs, dads, families, and everybody else) out for a good time and a night on the town, only to slip a main course of gender theory and discourse on the patriarchy into its sugar coating of arch-camp hilarity.
But I’ve got one very specific bone to pick, and it’s about Rollerblading. I mean, I guess it’s nice that Ken “literally goes nowhere” without his Rollerblades? And I guess it’s fun that you can actually buy the same kind of skates that he and Barbie slow-roll around Venice Beach on (if only to be ridiculed by virtually everyone who spots them). But here’s where I need to do one of those “full disclosure” sidebars: I’ve been, let’s say, “skating” for years, off and on; I’ve gone from a casual skater to a pretty serious street skater to an injured skater to giving it all up for years, and then I’ve cranked it all up and done it again. Through it all, there’s one word that nobody I’ve skated with for fun, trained with, or occasionally raced with has ever used for what we do—and that is “Rollerblading.”
It’s a tedious problem—a legal one, of course: Even those imitation Barbie and Ken skates you can buy? They’re not actually “Rollerblades.” That’s a brand name, albeit one that long ago became a kind of casual stand-in for a certain kind of skate. “Rollerblading,” meanwhile, seems to have morphed, since Rollerblades were first put on the market in 1987, into a vague verb that now has something to do with being vaguely active on wheels, maybe in some kind of wink-wink retro way.
I mean, Rollerblades are fun—and pretty easy to pick up if you haven’t used them before. (Writer Abby Aguirre even skated with Margot Robbie as part of her recent cover story, as did Chioma Nnadi for Michaela Coel’s.) In scores of places all over the world, people gather together in groups of 2 to 200 and skate all over the streets and sidewalks, for a few blocks or a few miles (Manhattan’s Wednesday Night Skate has been doing it weekly since 1996, and, this weekend, the annual Big Apple Roll storms the city, with thousands of skaters from all over the world coming together for a series of skates and gatherings). But ask anybody who’s been out for one of those what they call what they do, and they’ll tell you: It’s called in-line skating, or just skating. And it’s great.
And you can in-line skate in Rollerblades, for sure. That’s exactly what I was doing a couple years ago, in Rollerblades designed for a bit more intense urban skating, for a few laps around Brooklyn’s Prospect Park, when I was spotted, or scouted, or something. I’d stopped to guzzle some water from a fountain on the side of the loop path when three guys in skintight speed suits, each of them wearing the distinctive, shoe-like speed-skating boots atop three large wheels that I’d seen on the feet of the skaters in the pelotons that whooshed by me on weekends, rolled up to me and introduced themselves. “Come skate with us,” one of them said. I asked them where they were going, how far. “Well, we started in Sheepshead Bay [in outer Brooklyn], and we skated to Central Park and did a few laps, and now we’re going to do a few laps here and then head back to Sheepshead Bay.” NB: This total trip is somewhere beyond 50 miles. (A local skater group, the Empire Skate Club, meanwhile, recently organized a multiday skate from Manhattan to Toronto.) I begged off, blaming my non-speed skates and muttering something about just trying to shake off the cobwebs. “No—we’ve been following you; you’re good,” one of them replied.
I blamed my schedule, my fitness, something, anything—another time, maybe. I said goodbye to my new friends, and then I went home, carefully measured my feet, got myself a pair of Bont Jet speed skates, and started putting myself through glorious hell.
If the casual skater probably starts on Rollerblades, the entry drug to speed skating is often the Bont Jet, a short boot built of carbon and fiberglass hand-shaped around memory foam and epoxy resin. Advanced skaters match their own handpicked boots with specific frames and wheels; I went for the whole kit and caboodle as Bont assembled them.
Here’s the weird part: When the skates show up, you unscrew the boots from the frames, preheat your oven to 185 degrees Fahrenheit, and bake the boots for 15–20 minutes. Take them out, put them on your bare feet as soon as you dare, lace them up nice and tight, wear them while standing for 5 or 10 minutes, et voilà: You’ve now got custom heat-molded speed boots literally shaped to fit your exact feet.
Out on the asphalt, my first laps are as expected: a bit wobbly, but fun as hell. A few skates later, as the muscles in my ankles became stronger, the wobbles disappeared. And a few weeks after that, feeling confident and ridiculously fast on my new Jets, I joined my erstwhile friends and a few other hardcore speed skaters from Empire Skate Club—including everyone from young women to old men, each of them intimidatingly fit—for their weekly training session in Prospect Park on Saturday mornings.
After a few minutes of stretching, warm-ups, and the explanation of some ground rules for skating in a peloton—perhaps most importantly, how close you should be to the person in front of you (and how not to put your hand on that person’s ass when you need to reach out and touch them to slow yourself down)—we were off. On that day’s agenda were two laps of moderately paced skating focusing on form, followed by as much of a free-for-all speed fest as anybody cared to muster.
First up: the park’s massive downhill. It’s something I’ve always loved and attacked when skating on my own. Why merely tolerate a big hill when you can power through it and feel the wind ripping past you? Now, in our peloton, we’re taking the hill at a speed I could never imagine. (It’s all physics: With only the front skater taking wind resistance, everybody else drafts behind whoever’s in front of them and converts all their spent energy into propelling the group forward.) On the flats, it’s more of a trick to modulate my speed to exactly what’s needed to stay in my particular position in the peloton; the group leader—a monstrously fit guy who competes up and down the East Coast—skates alongside me, offering advice on form (most essentially: I need to bend my knees much further, pushing off to the side in strokes that seem almost comically long and powerful for someone coming from “regular” in-line skates). By the time we hit the enormous hill on the Park’s north end, I’m reeling, but I gut it out. Lap two was more of the same, amplified, but when the big hill came around again, I waved off the group, said my thanks—it’s worth noting that everyone in the peloton thanked me for showing up and urged me to join them again the next weekend—and spent the rest of the day downing fluids and ibuprofen, foam-rolling my entire body, and playing with my TheraGun until the batteries ran out.
Will you see me gunning for a world championship? Skating to Canada? You will not. At the moment, I think I hold the odd distinction of being the slowest skater on speed skates in Prospect Park. But, as the saying goes, speed is a number; fast, on the other hand, is a feeling. And I’m in love with that feeling. I literally go nowhere without my skates.
I just don’t call them you-know-what.
