J-Rod Australia Trip

Hey guys

Jrod here. Just wanted to fill everyone in on my trip to Australia and my future events.

So I started off my trip arriving in Newcastle.

There I took the train to Bar Beach where my buddy Jeremy Rowling was kind enough to pick me up and let me stay at his home.

Skated the bowl that week to get ready for the comp on Saturday. It was a sweet bowl. Golden colored with great transitions. A few kinks, but nothing too bad. I was feeling ready, but early contest day I slammed hard. Hung up (clipped my back truck) on a body jar (nose grab air to tail) and fell straight to the flat bottom. I got a nice swellbow from that. In my qualifying runs I slammed again three more times. Each time on my elbow (wear your elbow pads kids) it swelled up all the way to my forearm. I made it into finals, but the medic and other people were telling me not to skate. I said $&@! That and skated. I believe I got 6th in that comp.

The next stop was Manly Beach for the Hurley Beach Bowl contest. I drove down there with my friend from Colorado, Chris Patton, who had a rental car. That was an interesting drive. Driving on the wrong side of the road and all. Anyways the beach bowl was unfortunately not as smooth as the Newcastle bowl, it being made of wood and being on the sand, it has its flaws, but I still handled it well. I was pretty stoked with my skating on it this year. Only slammed once during the best trick on a fs losi grind revert attempt over the hip. Got a pretty nice scraped hip from it. The kind that burns in the shower. Overall I got 5th place and definitely stoked.

We took a big bus to Bondi Beach where we would stay at the Beach Road hotel. All the people on the event stay there. Before going to skate the bowl I definitely needed a days rest. I threw on my beach shorts and just relaxed on the beach. The next day practice was on! Having a pretty close replica of this bowl in my home town, I was feeling pretty confident, but this bowl was way more different and way harder to skate. It was grippy at first then slippery. The coping was chunky and the trannies were bumpy. Definitely one of the hardest bowls to skate.

I managed to land a few knew tricks this year that I haven’t done In there before, so I was feeling real excited. It rained contest day. Everyone was worried they might postponed it til Sunday. The rain cleared up and the contest was on. I made my runs in qualifying and made finals. Now was the time to shine. But unfortunately I couldn’t hold it together in the finals. 5 runs best two runs count. I landed one full run and fell at the end of time on the rest of my runs. Therefore landing me in 5th place. I was a little disappointed, but hey, we have our good days and our bad. Back to the drawing board and gearing up for the next event, the Vans Pool Party. Where last year I took 2nd place next to Tristam Rennie. Only way is up now!

Thank you Torque for making my bondi trip happen! Let’s nail these other comps!

Later

Jrod