Tonight's offskates training: manual labor!

Yesterday we went to SCRD to scrim and train, and when we got there, the floor looked like this:

 NOOOOO! They were covering up their lovely concrete tile floor with plastic tiles. Mega sadface. SCRD had acquired a plastic tile floor, kind of like the one they use at BAD. I really liked their old floor; it was a bit dusty (and made your wheels grubby) but it was so nice and smooth and flat. Plastic tiles sometimes have a tendency to bubble (like if they don't get snapped down properly) and also cracks, since there's about an inch between them and the concrete floor. To be fair, the concrete floor was pretty hard to fall on and the plastic stuff is a bit more springy and gives a bit, but I'm still a bit bummed that the nice concrete floor was covered up. I would have been much happier if they just sealed it and we could skate on that. Oh well.

I think it's a second hand floor, because they also had to powerwash a bunch of tape off it. So the tiles were wet and slippery. And assembling these bastards is hard! There are little plastic things on two sides (like one on the length and one on the width) that interlock with the loops on the other two sides. That also meant that if you started at the wrong end you would have to put the plastic loops under plastic tiles that were already down, which resulted in squashed fingers and a lot more work. We started at the wrong end. Boo.

I moved like a thousand of these bad boys.

So then we tiled to the right end, and then started from there! We broke/assembled the tiles into 5x5 squares (which were light enough and not ridiculously bulky to move--I could carry a 3x5x5 without too much trouble) and then laid them down so that we could assemble them when they were in place.

Basically, the brown/gold pieces were outside the track, and the blue ones were inside. The one at BAD isn't colour coordinated; it's basically that white/grey marbly looking stuff with random fluroescent yellow or pink tiles, and they just taped off the track with bright pink tape, but the contrast on this one was more obvious:

Shape fail, or that is a really weird apex to jump.

Luckily, the old track tape was still down so we could use them as a guideline. I wanted to get the tiles as accurately as possible, so it would look nice and accurate, so I was doing this sort of thing:

Pretty handiwork, if I say so myself.

D called me out on being "a bit crazy OCD" because I was being a perfectionist. Ha ha ha.

But that meant that I had to reassemble the 5x5 squares, boo. And then the track was much more pixelly than it had to be. It ended up looking like this on one of the corners:

And this is the outside of the track, looking in:

We had to leave at about 9:30pm or so to go home, and I think people were still there until 1am, so I don't think there was any skates on. But this is what it looked like when it was 3/4 done! Nice 8-bit track, if I say so myself.

I'd still prefer the other floor to skate on, but let's see how this one goes on Wednesday.