Listen
Rae Loos loves roller skating, but not the kind you do at the roller rink. She’s into what some people call ‘aggressive roller skating,’ which is more commonly done at the skate park.
The full transcript of this episode of KUT News Now is available on the KUT & KUTX Studio website. The transcript is also available as subtitles or captions on some podcast apps.
This Is My Thing: Aggressive Roller Skating!
*Show open and theme song
Michael Lee [00:00:12] I’m Michael Lee and you’re listening to This Is My Thing. There’s a pretty good chance that you found this show as part of the KUT News Now podcast feed, but you should know that this program is not at all about the news. So you’re welcome or I’m sorry, whichever applies to you. On This Is My Thing, we talk to people about the things they do just for themselves. It’s not their job and it’s not a responsibility, just a thing that brings them joy or feeds their soul. This week, aggressive roller skating. This piece comes to us from my friend Zahra Crim, who until recently was KUT’s community producer and is now off to grad school and their next adventure. Before leaving the station, though, Zahra talked with their friend Rae Loos about their shared love for the kind of roller skating that’s done at the skate park and not the roller rink.
Rae Loos [00:00:58] I’m Rae Loos and I love roller skating.
Zahra Crim [00:01:05] Yes. So we both skate at the skate park. That’s actually where we met. If someone asked me, I think I would just say I roller skate. I don’t know if like you, if someone asked you. Oh, like, what do you do? Do you think that you say like I aggressive quad skate?
Rae Loos [00:01:22] I usually say I roller skate, but if I meet someone in the wild and you say like I roller skate, they usually think like a roller rink, and then they start talking about that, or they start talking about, what’s the movie with it? Xanadu?
Zahra Crim [00:01:53] (overlapping) Whip It?
Rae Loos Oh yeah. Or Derby. Derby. Yeah. We’re like, oh, do you do Derby? I’m like, nah. So a lot of people I think don’t even know that. It’s a thing that you can take the quad skates to the ramps and like do it at the skate park, but that’s pretty much exclusively how I. How I skate.
Zahra Crim [00:01:53] Is all aggressive, quiet skating at the skate park.
Rae Loos [00:01:56] Not necessarily. There’s like a movement of quad skaters. I think it’s cooler. Who do street skating? It’s the thing with skateboarders and BMX where you go out and you just you scout out like cool spots in the world, like in urban environments, like a rail outside of a bank or something. Like anything that looks cool. And then. You skated?
Rae Loos (at the skate park) [00:02:30] And right now we’re at House Park in Austin, Texas, USA is a bustling, metropolis filled with life, filled with bikes, kids, a couple of roller skaters, skateboards, mostly skateboards. It feels like like an intersection with no light or stop signs. Sometimes, like, everyone’s on wheels and we’re all just trying not to run into each other. So I try to call them when it’s emptier, but it’s also fun having people around to like, look at and get inspired by even the skateboards or the BMX areas. I like to like look at what they’re doing and maybe try and imitate it in a way.
Zahra Crim [00:03:09] So how long do you think that you went from being like, just a person who knew how to skate because you really distance skating into someone who, like, started feeling really comfortable, like with tricks? Yeah.
Rae Loos [00:03:22] I got into this maybe like six years ago. Really? Seriously, the quad skating at the skate park is like relatively newer in the last ten years. It’s become a thing. So every time I say I roller skate, people don’t really imagine this. They imagine like the roller rink or derby, but this is very different. I like that it’s kind of more freestyle. It’s about creativity. It’s kind of a combination of like gymnastics and skating. I get bored at the roller rink. You just go around and around in circles and I get dizzy.
Zahra Crim [00:03:59] Can you describe your space for me?
Rae Loos [00:04:02] My skates. I wear Antik, the same word as you. It’s a custom boot. It’s black and turquoise. Turquoise accents. Black suede. Turquoise accents. I made my toe caps that covers the front of the skate and protects it from damage. There’s a lot of modifications you can do. You can’t really just buy a pair of skates that’s like ready to go for the skate park. You have to add like wide trucks, a grind block and get specific wheels.
Zahra Crim [00:04:33] Or any of those things different than what you would normally get. And like I set up and it is that important.
Rae Loos [00:04:37] Yes. Okay. So the trucks, the wide trucks. So I’ve taken off the trucks and put on wider trucks, which just make it more stable to go on like big ramps. It just makes grinding easier and doing specific grinds. So, like.
Zahra Crim [00:04:53] What’s a grind?
Rae Loos [00:04:54] A grind you drop into the bowl or. Yeah.
Zahra Crim [00:04:59] Drop into the bowl. Winds blowing in your face.
Rae Loos [00:05:01] Yeah I drop it. I come up on the other side and I jump on to the coping. And you jump onto that and you can either stall. It is just to like land on it and stand there, or you can slide or grind.
Zahra Crim [00:05:27] You just like name or describe some of the tricks that you like doing?
Rae Loos [00:05:31] I don’t know.
Zahra Crim [00:05:33] It’s just silly.
Rae Loos [00:05:34] I like doing silly little joke tricks just to, like, make my friends laugh like I like doing. You do like a tap dance on the coping. Well, just like pull up and also, like, catch up to chat.
Zahra Crim [00:05:48] I don’t know if you have a separate thing. I like what you like doing versus you like. I really like the way this looks.
Rae Loos [00:05:52] I like showing off the. It’s called a ho ho. It’s a handstand. So what you do? I’ll describe it and maybe then we can do it. I need to do it on a big round. You skate up to the ramp and you go really fast, and you plant your hands on the edge of the bowl, and then you shoot your feet straight up into the air. Squeeze your legs together and then drop back backwards into the bowl. But that one, I finally got that one. It was so satisfying. I was like, that’s the best feeling in the world. Well, cartwheel action was not on purpose. It was really hard to learn.
Rae Loos [00:06:45] It took a lot of practice, but then, now that I’ve got it, it’s like. It’s just like an easy crowd pleaser. I usually do it usually if there’s like a little girl and her family at the park, I’ll do.
Rae Loos [00:06:55] It just to show.
Zahra Crim [00:06:56] Off. Yeah.
Rae Loos [00:06:57] So she can do tension. Yeah. Sometimes if they’re trying to do something in the bowl and usually they’re skateboarding because that’s all people don’t. Not a lot of people do this. I’ll, like, kind of keep an eye on them and, like, make sure nobody’s dropping in at the same time. Yeah. The goal is to inspire, because that’s what I would have wanted.
Zahra Crim [00:07:22] You was saying for a long time. So it’s like, how often do you really feel like I want to learn something new?
Rae Loos [00:07:27] I guess just like hitting like an element or an obstacle that I’m, like, scared of. Like, there’s that one down ledge over there. I just got the 5050 on the rail that is right foot in front of the left foot, parallel to a rail, which is a metal bar on the ground. Yeah, I go off rails like scary.
Zahra Crim [00:07:50] Which side do you cross from? Left to right.
Rae Loos [00:07:54] Learning a new trick. I love that because it’s I don’t love it. But you start off and you’re like, I can’t do this. How could anyone do this like all the other, like, see a video or watch someone do something and like, how do they do that? And then usually over the course of several weeks, I’ll like step by step, get a little bit closer. And then all of a sudden it clicks. That’s a lot of hours. I think someone commented on one of my videos once. They’re like. I just like a random woman. Just like, I don’t think I would want to do this for the number of hours that it would take to get good at this or something like that. I was like, well, I do, yeah. Like, I want to, like, fall over and over and like, slowly improve.
Rae Loos [00:08:54] I’m dropping in the deep end. 50, 50. Grind. Back side grind. Air over the hill. Air over another hoop. The unity manual. Between the balls and 360 out.
Zahra Crim [00:09:18] You know how you like. Yeah. Championships. Yeah. Just like, what does that feel like? To get into.
Rae Loos [00:09:23] A feel, like, confident and cool and fast and fun. It’s like the closest you’ll ever be to flying. I was just talking to someone. Ask like to what? Did you go skydiving? I was like, no, this is enough. It’s my favorite and I love it so much.
*theme song fades up and under
Michael Lee [00:09:51] Thanks for listening to This Is My Thing.. I’m Michael Lee and this week’s episode of This Is My Thing. was produced by Zahra Crim. It’s kind of a full circle thing with Zahra. The day we met them, when they came in to interview for KUT’s community producer Job, Zahra mentioned that aggressive roller skating was one of their hobbies, and I mentioned that I was developing this show. And producing this piece for This Is My Thing. turned out to be Zahra’s last piece of work for KUT before heading out to grad school. Good luck in your next adventure, Zahra! Special thanks, of course, to Rae Loos for sharing her love of roller skating with us. If you haven’t done it already, you can check out a video of Rae doing her thing at the skate park on our show page at KUT.org We’ve got a lot more This Is My Thing coming soon. We recently took a train ride with a student train conductor, met a guy who plays bike polo and visited the Brick Rodeo with a pretty good LEGO builder. Keep listening to hear those stories and more. If you’d like to tell us about your thing and maybe be a part of a future episode of the show, that’s easy. Just go to the This Is My Thing show page at KUT.org. You’ll find a form on that page you can fill out to tell us about your thing. And speaking of forms you can fill that on KUT.org, there’s also a form you can fill out to become a member of the station. Please feel free to join us if you’d like to! Our members make this and everything we do possible.
Laurie Gallardo [00:11:15] Support for This Is My Thing comes from locally owned Eckert Insurance. Worry less. Live more.
This transcript was transcribed by AI, and lightly edited by a human. Accuracy may vary. This text may be revised in the future.
