Junior communication major John Adams has been in-line skating, or stunt roller blading as he prefers to call it, for about 10 years and has been doing so competitively for five years.

Before coming to NIU he attended the College of DuPage, which allowed him to save money while focusing seriously on his skating and travels. It is because of his skating that Adams came to join MySpace.

“It was a good way to keep in touch with guys I skate with from out of state,” Adams said. “Also, it has become a good way to set up places to stay when going out of town for skate competitions.”

After five years of competitive stunt roller blading, Adams isn’t planning on competing anymore but that doesn’t mean he’s hanging up his skates forever.

“From now on I think I am just doing it for fun and exercise,” Adams said. “If there was still some money left in the skate industry, I would probably be able to try and make some loot from it, but right now it isn’t looking so hot. The two largest corporate sponsors [Rollerblade and Solomon] have recently pulled out from sponsorship of skaters, media, and competitions.”

On his MySpace profile, Adams lists one of his occupations as a roller-skate dancer, a career he made up. He does participate in the occasional roller-disco session when he has the chance.

“I actually listed that as an occupation to make fun of the outrageous amount of time I have spent roller blading and getting practically nothing back for it,” Adams said. “I guess I have roller discoed once in my life. It was a friend of mine’s birthday and she really wanted a ‘70s-themed party. So everyone got dressed up and went to the roller-rink. Yeah, it was pretty amazing, and for about three hours I was convinced I was going to quit doing tricks on roller blades to make room in my life for dancing on roller skates.”

Adams began skating when he was 11 years old and considers himself a good skater, or at least better than most. He has still suffered his share of skate-related injures.

“The worse I have been injured from skating would be either the eight stitches in my shin I got last year after splitting it to the bone, or the broken foot I had earlier this summer,” Adams said. “Most of my injuries relating to skating happen during the parties after the events, rather than while actually skating.”

Adams has been actively participating in the competitive skating world, small as that may have become, for five years and has entered dozens of competitions in that time, somewhere between 25 and 40 of them, he estimates. However, he has been cursed with the inability to place in the top three. While Adams has gotten used to placing fourth or fifth, he is still proud of what he has been able to achieve.

“The competition I am most proud of would probably be the second annual Windy City Riot because I made it to the finals skating the whole day with a broken hand protected only by a bandana,” he said. “I placed 10 out of 10 because I had to miss the final round to catch a ride to the hospital.”

When he’s not competing, Adams often finds himself teaching kids how to skate, a deal he originally set up so he could skate for free at various skate parks. Adams began teaching younger skaters the tricks of the trade when he was 16 and has continued to do so ever since.

“I started doing it at Warp skate park as a trade-off with the owner to let me skate for free the rest of the week,” Adams said. “When I moved to St. Louis after high school I made the same deal with a park down there.”

When he isn’t skating or hitting the books at NIU, Adams finds himself traveling. His most recent trip included a 10-day stay in Egypt with the luxury of an antiquities pass, something very important if you want to get close to any of the great monuments.

“My stepfather is a field archeologist, and he invited me to come visit while he was out there,” Adams said. “It was pretty amazing because I was able to see a lot of sights most don’t because of his antiquities pass.”

Understandably Adam’s trip was fun but it also gave him a lot of insight into how different the world really is outside of the U.S.’s borders. The trip gave him a lot to think about.

“However, more than anything it was kind of a shock to see what life is like in a third-world country,” Adams said. “I had never experienced anything like it. The moment I will probably remember most from it was while I was in Luxor, and I had found out that there was a terrorist attack in Cairo. And then realizing that it had occurred directly in front of the hotel I had stayed at three nights prior.”