So the time has come and you have realized that "no, Superman slides aren't effective and the way forward to the true path of a downhill skateboarder is to learn the most paramount of slides in the whole game" the Coleman slide. Also known as a pendulum slide.
well strap on your pads, loosen your trucks and hold on for dear life because it's about get weird!
Coleman's feel funky because you are trying to face your body downhill fully, instead of being sideways like when you ride. So how do you get that way? Well the carve is the key. By this time you should have getting low, carving, and grabbing rail down. Here is a checkpoint list of what you need to be able to do to properly Coleman.
1. Carve while grabbing rail with your uphill facing arm behind your back knee and your hand behind your back foot. While doing this glide your front hand along the ground and be okay with trying to put some weight on it while carving into the direction. If it hurts your elbow or shoulder, try sucking your triceps into your side so that your upper arm all the way down to your elbow is "glued" to your torso. This will give you more power and also keep your weight centered over your board so you don't have to hold up as much weight. (The further you lean off your board, the harder the slide will be).
2. Step 2 I'd say is the hardest part. You've got to get some speed on a hill. Once your going fast, do a big arcing carve onto your toeside rail, get low and grab rail with your back hand and put your front hand on the ground and carve back the other way while focusing on shifting your weight to your front foot and foreword arm. Now this is where it gets tricky. The energy and power to make the slide happen begins with your lower body, mostly your hips. You want your weight to be forward on the front of your board so having your feet closer together really helps. Remember how I said you want to shift your body so that your facing downhill? Well this is where that happens. Using your hips and while grabbing rail behind your back leg on the toeside edge, dive into the Downhill grade leaning off of your board behind you, and with your front arm very close or even touching your body keep rotating until your front hand is behind you. Then keep leaning into the uphill until your board shifts from a aggressive carve into a full blown slide. As long as your body position doesn't move to much and remains powerful, the slide will continue and eventually pendulum back to going straight. Then you can release the board, reestablish riding down the hill and stand up and continue carving.
4. Oh your still sliding? Well congrats you just did a double pendy! But wait! That's not really that helpful in open road downhill conditions. This trick, the Coleman, is either for shutting down fast, or sliding into a corner. It's actually best for predrifting into a corner. If your are regular footed, you'll want to pull this slide off before a sharp corner so you can ride safely though the corner at a speed that works. You can even do this slide before a corner going the wrong way to safely scrub speed so you can slide a toeside slide, or grip through the corner. Either or, the Coleman side is great for managing speed.
The final form of the Coleman is to slide it into a 180 and go through the corner backwards with both hands on the ground for steeze points. It feels great too! So don't let the fast racers fool you, a coleman slide is first and foremost a trick, not a maneuver for racing. But above all it is the best tool in your kit for controlling speed on open roads because after practicing it You can do a penadulum in a straight line in your lane and stop your board, just as fast as a bike can stop using the brakes.
Now, when is a Coleman not helpful? I wonder, is there such a thing as using the trick as a crutch too much? Well, the answer is yes if all you know how to do is a pendy and you need to slide a corner that requires a toe side pre drift, then doing a Coleman can result in either a weird feeling slide into th me uphill bank of a corner then have you hook up going the wrong way into traffic. Also you might be doing a slide way too big in front of other people and having them crashing into you from behind. So it's good to know how to asses when and where a Coleman slide is nessecary, if skating open roads where the banking of the road goes down away from your heels the. A coleman might work great, but if the bank of the road is fighting against you, or a corner is the other way then probably not. If your either A. doing a session in a corner and trying to nail the slide or B. Trying to kill wheels in huge steep wide straight away then yes get down.
the pendy is the entryway into skating any hill in the world and making it down to the bottom safely. Learn it, master it, let it become you and ride safe.
