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Mboarding in Adrenaline Alley Alan Newman reports on a trip to see what Corby's indoor skatepark Adrenaline Alley had to offer... After hearing about the fabled Adrenaline Alley in Corby, the Ride the Hill team & I had been up for going for a long time. As you all know, it can take quite a bit to organise a group of Mountainboarders to do anything let alone to trek halfway up the country on a Saturday morning! In spite of this, after a few weeks of talking about it and trying to get a good group of riders together we all agreed to meet at mine and make the journey to Corby, Northamptonshire. After a couple of hours drive we pulled up in the car park to find Lester and Bob had just arrived so we queued up to get inside. The only way to describe my first impressions of the park was pure awe! The place is massive and its quite easy to get lost just trying to find your way around. The basic layout consists of a wooden bowl, pretty big street area with some really cool features, a couple of mini ramps including one with a nice little spine transfer, a huge vert ramp with a lovely resi ramp on the side and the much talked about resi jump box. In case you don't know, a resi ramp is basically a really think layer of foam with a rubber layer on top so you can ride away from tricks but it doesn't hurt if you slam on it (as Renny proved by landing on his head!). The riders who came along were: Alan Newman (Me), Matt Brind, Ieuan J ehu, Ryan Roberts, Bob Phillips, Lester Shrimpton, Renny Myles and Gary Crowhurst. We had a quick warm up in the bowl with some pretty sick stuff going down. 270's in and out of stalls, grabs and spins over the little hip and Matt getting a nice Disaster on the extension. We had a long session on the resi vert after this. If I had to choose then this would probably be my favourite part of the park, its so much fun just being able to drop in from the 14ft+ lip and be able to throw yourself around without really worrying about the consequences. Needless to say it took a little while to get it in your head that it doesn't hurt to bail but once we did then 360's, 540's and loads of tweaked out airs were being thrown by all involved and me and Matt dropped the vert (I think Matt even got a stall on the vert but my memories not what it used to be!). We had a great session on the street course a bit later, there is a lot of grindable and rideable stuff there for Mountainboarders, I'd say some of the highlights were Gary popping over the driveway, Matt spinning in and out of whatever he could get his hands (and trucks) on and me and Ryan getting skate style crooked grinds on a couple of the boxes there. The best sessions of the day probably went down on the resi jump box, it's such a strange feeling to be able to ride it like a foam pit and still be able to ride away! As you'd expect Matt and Renny were in their element, with Renny going massive on 5's, flips and rodeo variations. Matt was trying some cork 9's which he got ridiculously close to, but apart from this was throwing 7's, switch flips and 5's as if they were nothing! Big props go to Ieuan for riding away from backflips for the first time (he got them on dirt a couple weeks later) and I was really stoked to learn BS cork 540. All in all it was a great day and good fun was had by all, if you haven't got around to checking out Corby yet then I highly recommend that you get a move on! They are moving to a new location some time in the future and may not be able to take all the current features with them. They did assure us that the resi jump will still be a main feature of the new location as well though!! Out of interest, Adrenaline Alley is not your normal indoor skate park business, it goes a lot further than that; it is a charity set up to provide space and facilities for people to pratice their urban sports, so you'll be 'doing your bit' if you go ride there! If the photo's don't speak for them selves Rob phillips RTH resident film maker has put togther this dope vid from their day out in the east midlands. Corby Trip 2010 from Rob Phillips on Vimeo. Find out loads more about it on their website adrenalinealley.co.uk Know more about the Ride the Hill team here Thanks to all! |
