The pinnacle of all human achievement
And I'm not even joking.
When I moved to Boston in October, 1990 I was amazed that there were so many skaters in the streets - on quads and inlines. I had grown up skating on ice and knew immediately that I wanted to be a city skater.
On my first visit to the Common I saw a group of skaters playing frisbee on the Frog Pond and it blew my mind. They were all skating quads. So the following spring I went to Beacon Hill Skate and bought my first pair of rollerskates. The inline craze was in full swing but I got quads because that's what the roller frisbee players were skating on.
My experience skating on ice helped but there was still a pretty steep learning curve. But I loved it from day one and skated whenever I could.
I lived on Comm Ave in the Back Bay so I learned on the Mall, Copley Square, the Christian Science Center, and the Hatch Shell. I found the best routes connecting those spots and eventually expanded my territory to include the Public Garden and then the Common.
By mid-summer I was confident enough to sit and watch the roller frisbee players until they invited me to join them. I was terrible! I had neither the skating skills nor the frisbee skills to play well. So I would play for a bit and then sit out to watch and learn.
I was officially The Rookie.
It was really the best thing I ever did to improve my skating skills. There was no time to think or hesitate, I just had to make the play - and if making the play required sprinting or jumping or transitioning to backward then that's what I did. It all become automatic, and the skills transferred to the street.
I developed the skills to play well, and that's when I discovered The Zone. The Flow State. Every game became The Best Game Ever - we all agreed. We were totally immersed in the experience but none of us could ever remember exactly what had happened - we just knew we wanted to do it again.
That was 35 years ago and I've been chasing the flow state ever since. I've pursued many different activities: climbing, surfing, sailing, yoga, trail running. Nothing is as reliable as roller frisbee for getting me into the flow state. Street skating in traffic comes closest.
I continued to play roller frisbee until I moved away from Boston. We lost access to the Frog Pond and found other venues but nothing so centrally located and highly visible. We were unable to attract new players, so this amazing sport that had been played since the mid 80s eventually died.
For us it was a cooperative freestyle sport, no scoring, everyone on the same team. The objective was to keep the disk in play. Catching and throwing are of course valid plays, but tipping and popping are preferred.
I was a bit of a setup specialist. In a typical sequence a group of five or six skaters would start skating in the same direction in loose formation. From the back of the pack I'd throw an arcing pass that stalled and hovered in front of a forward wing player with the correct height and spin for them to tip it to another forward player, who'd pop it up so that it dropped in front of a second row player, who tipped it, and so on until someone caught it or it fell.
Coming to the end of the skateable space led to some very complex rapid-fire plays where the disk moved very little as the skaters crossed under it and reversed direction.
Every few years I go looking for video evidence that anyone else has discovered the secret. This video is the only one I've found.
The skater in this video is demonstrating excellent skills. If you think solo roller frisbee is easy I invite you to put that hypothesis to the test. Better yet, the next time you get together with your skating crew, bring an Ultrastar 175g sport disc and start tossing it around.