By Enlik Tagashiva
On March 15th, Mayor Bill de Blasio announced that New York City schools would be closing until a tentative reopening on April 20th.
While classes are being restructured for remote learning, we don’t want to forget all our friends among the students, teachers and the vibrant community here at MCSM.
If you look out the windows from the staircase on Manhattan Center’s east wing (where the science department is), you will see a skatepark filled with ramps, half pipes, handrails and well– skaters. If you pass by that park after school, you might catch Ivan Lara, an 11th grader who skates with his rollerblades almost everyday after school.
After the 8th period bell rang, I would always catch a glimpse of that skatepark, and among the skateboarders, I always noticed Ivan on his rollerskates. I myself, had attempted to get into skating, but the fear of losing control and falling has always kept me too paralyzed to persist. That’s why I knew I had to talk to Ivan about his life as an inline skater.
First, I asked Ivan how he got into skating and he told me: “There are many factors, I guess, but it all started because of my father.”
Ivan’s father began skating back in the 1990s when inline skating first took off as a popular sport. “Dad had a whole crew and everything.” Ivan explained. “He told me how he would do these tricks with cones, and I was curious —so I tried it.”
But perfecting a new skill wasn’t easy. Ivan recalls feeling at one point like he wanted to give up and just throw away his skates. But with the support of his father, who began to teach Ivan the fundamentals of skating, it became so easy that Ivan recalls, “It felt just like I was walking.”
Eagerness soon drove Ivan’s motivation to better his technique. He went on to say that his desire to learn newer, harder, cooler, skating tricks “became an addiction.” But once he found out that skating was actually a sport, he began to push himself even harder.
When I asked Ivan what I thought was an easy question: “Why do you love to skate?” he replied, “That’s like asking me ‘why do you love to eat?’” Ivan attributed his affection for the sport to three main components: (1) the satisfaction of learning a new skill, (2) the aesthetic, or beauty of skating, and (3) the uniqueness of the sport.
Ivan explained how in incline skating, there is a very wide range of different tricks you can do. There are “grinds”, “grabs”, “spins”, “switch ups”, special slides with more than 50 variations, and much more. As Ivan describes it, skating “became an escape” from his ordinary world because it was a way to de-stress from the demands of everyday life. When the skates are on, that’s all that matters. The demanding world shuts off, and his “in the moment” reality begins.
Finally, I asked what was next for him. Turns out, Ivan is more than a skater. He also likes to make music in his free time. Tracks by established artists such as Joji and The Deli, inspire Ivan’s own lo-fi hip-hop music, which blends traditional hip-hop with elemental jazz to conjure up smooth, instrumental beats.
In order to bring more awareness to inline skating, Ivan began making music videos that feature him skating, doing tricks on ramps and stairs. Now he is in the process of setting up his own YouTube channel so these videos and his original music can be available to the public. To check out some of Ivan’s content, you can follow him on Instagram at: “that_brown_kid_ivan”.
