Inline skating in Groningen

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Carmen works in a hospital (but can’t really explain her job in english; she says it would take ages). She lives in Groningen and regards it as the most beautiful and most underestimated town in The Netherlands. When not skating or working Carmen loves to read a good book (when she has time in her busy life to finish it!) or watch a dvd. Carmen is currently considering a career change and going back to college again.

The other day I was reading on a Dutch forum and a friend of mine had made a long post about things happening with skating around here. Someone replied with a typical comment: “When I think of Groningen, skating is not the first thing on my mind!” He didn’t think that there was enough decent asphalt around here. He also claimed to have lived here, and because of that, that comment surprised me a lot. I told him that he should bring his skates next time he’s visiting again, because Groningen is very suitable for skating!

For starters: There is this thing about the Dutch with riding a bike. Most people have at least one bike, but they probably have more. The government is trying to stimulate people to get to work on their bikes (and also by other means such as public transport, but those are irrelevant in this piece). Every year there is this contest of ‘biketown’ of the year and Groningen always enters. The city is proud of it’s facility for bikes and always does it’s best to win the competition. They have managed this a couple of times and at least they manage every year to end up in the top. I can see that you’re thinking: what has this to do with skating, well, that’s easy: what’s good for winning this competition are bike paths and smooth (wide) roads. Bike paths and smooth roads are also very good for skaters.
Groningen has just one downside as far as the bike paths go: for maintenance they tend to use grind. So on occasion you are skating , turn a corner and stand still ( and jump onto the curbs) or you fall down, depending on your ability’s on skates. Luckily they don’t do this to all the bike paths; once ‘grinded’, they leave that path alone for a couple of years and depending on how busy the path is, you can usually skate properly on it again after a couple of days to two weeks or so.

If you like fitness-skating or speed skating, Groningen has another big plus: it’s not a big town (but we do have a very descent nightlife, in case you’d like to know) and before you know it, you’re in the countryside where you can either enjoy the scene by just cruising along, or speed up and keep on going for a long time, without too many crossroads. There are several books available with routes in and around Groningen, with different distances, so anyone can find their own way, if they like.
With the FFS (Friday Fun Skate, our local night skate) we recently have been asked by the city to organize a skate to promote different means of transportation on a car free Sunday. Of course we liked the idea, so we said yes to it. Our original plan was rejected, but the city found us a sponsor for the day: Arriva, they thought it would be a perfect combination to promote alternative means of transport and for us it was still something new and fun. With about 90 skaters we got on the train to a village nearby and from there we skated back to town. After this route, Arriva was very enthusiastic and asked us to do some route checks for them, because they had plans for routes for skaters, called: ‘De wind mee-tochten’ (The wind in your back-routes). The idea was to make a book with skate routes from different stations back to town. The plan was already there before we did this route, but it never came of the ground untill now. The book should be out by now, or else it will be soon. This provides a new alternative for fitness-skaters to do different routes and further out of town, without having their own transportation. I think most routes aren’t very good for speed skaters though, since the skates vary from only 5 to 16 km and most speed skaters I know do longer routes.
Of course it’s a lot more fun to skate with the locals, and my guess would be that you can always find someone willing to show you what they think the best routes are. To find someone, if you don’t know anybody around here, your best bet will be to post on the forum of our local night skate, mentioned before: www.fridayfunskate.nl Posting in English won’t be a problem, most people will be able to at least understand it.

Since I already brought up the night skate, twice, I should write some about it now. I already mentioned that Groningen is not a big town, so you can imagine that our skate is not very big, but it’s not bad either: we usually get 50-150+ people on the skate. The best way to predict how many people we get is to look at the weather for the past couple of weeks: When it has been raining a lot in the week before and we do give the go ahead for the skate, we just get the regulars (about 50 people) who trust the organization in making the right decision concerning the weather conditions. When it’s been nice and sunny weather in the week before and on the day itself, we probably get 80-100 skaters, but when the weather has been good for at least 2 weeks, the numbers go up to 120-150+. The route is different each week and it’s usually somewhere between 20 and 25 km. Sometimes we stay in town, but we also regularly go for a skate outside of town. The route will be shown on the website sometime in the week before the skate. The route gets a grade from 1 to 5, so people get an indication on what they can expect during the skate (concerning the difficulty), just scroll down when you click on ‘routes’ and this will appear, the distance of that route will also be shown. The skate runs from half of April until half of September. We always start and end in the ‘Noorderplantsoen’, unless the website says different, which will only be the case when there is a special occasion. The starting place will never change, but the ending could change. This will for instance be the case when we organize a roller disco.

I love doing some freestyle on skates, and for that I’m probably lucky I live here, because people are not really used to skaters doing crazy stuff on their skates. Therefore they are easy to impress…
Groningen is a very good place to put your cones (or cups) down and do your thing. Of course some places are better suited than others, we still can choose where we want to skate. I say we, because we have a (small) group of fanatics in this type of skating. We’re organised in a freestyle club called the cone kicking gumbies (CKG).
Some of the usual spots where we put down our cones are (again) the Noorderplantsoen; it’s not the best place in town for freestyling, but it has the atmosphere! On sunny days people are gathering together; laying on the grass, kids play on the playground, people playing soccer, doing kapuera, etc.; just a lovely place to be. Sometimes we choose go downtown to the center, behind city hall, and put down our cones there. Again, it may not be perfect, but it’s definitely do-able and in the summer there are a lot of people around. It’s just a great place to be if you want to chill (and yes, we love to chill, even when we pretend to be free-styling). When we are serious about practicing, we usually go to Cascade. This is a place close to the central train station and it has a very nice parking lot which is totally abandoned in the evenings and during weekends. We also have the option to go indoors twice a week. We use this option usually when it’s wet or when it’s very cold outside. Of course there are more places around town where you can put down cones, but these places are the ones where you have a good chance of finding some of us.
You can find more about us on www.ckgonline.eu For now you will be forwarded to the old site, a new one is build at the moment. But we do have a forum, so feel free to post a message there and you will get a reaction.

When we practice indoor, we use the venue of Inlinesport, the local skate school/shop. Inlinesport promotes all kinds of skating, so you can find more clubs there. I think their biggest club is the (inline) hockey club. They have one team playing competition in Germany and a team who plays just for fun.
I know some people also used to play outdoor, next to city hall, but I’m not sure if they still do. I guess the best way to find out if there is a hockey game planned somewhere, is to put a post on the FFS-forum. The same goes if you want to play roller basketball. I know that the group playing this doesn’t play much anymore, but I also know that some of them are still interested in playing every now and then, so a post will probably get some reactions and something will be organized easily.

When you’re an aggressive skater, Groningen isn’t too bad either. I don’t know much about this type of skating, but I do know that there are some fanatics around. Everywhere across town there a skate parks, some might not be much, but some are pretty descent (from what I understand), so just skate around town and you will probably find something you like. There is also a huge indoor skate park, The Colosseum, used by both inline skaters and skateboarders. They can probably tell you a lot more about this type of skating in Groningen, so, in case you’re interested, here’s the link to the website: www.colosseum.nl/home2.html

I’m probably missing some skating activity’s around here, but I do think the above gives a pretty good impression of skating in Groningen. So, if you ever visit Groningen, don’t forget your skates, there’s plenty to do around here!

Carmen