I've been getting a few inquiries about the PIC Skate and hope to do a more complete review on it soon.  But I thought you might be interested in these videos showing what's possible using the PIC skate.

You can see a nice routine here including multi-rotational jumps (axel and double salchow) by a student of Nick Perna (Phyllis).  This video was taken at the US Open Inline Skating Championships in Chicago on May 1-3, 2009.

In the following video, you can see a rehearsal by a circus performer using the PIC skate and a suspended hoop.  Maybe we need swings and hoops installed in ice rinks?

Essentially, the PIC skate is a inline roller blade having a 'radius' similar to that of a figure skate. It also has a "PIC" or rubber stopper where the toe pick would be on a traditional figure skate.  This design allows the skater to perform elements off the ice using the same technique they use on the ice.

Nick Perna (Nick's bio at about.com) is one of the inventors of the PIC skate (US Patent 5,738,360, issued April 14, 1998).  I chatted with Nick about the skate and asked him a number of questions that everyone keeps asking me.

First, is the transition from ice skating to PIC skating easy?  According to Nick it is.  He says that most skaters can get pretty comfortable on the PIC skate in a few days and can do nearly everything off the ice that they can do on the ice in that time.

Next, I asked him if he knew of anyone who learned to do an axel or double jumps in the PIC skate without having learned it on the ice first.  This is an important question for many users who want to get more skating time in but cannot due to lack of ice time.  Nick told me he didn't know of anyone who learned these elements on PIC skates first.  He suggested that most skaters will want to learn multi-rotation jumps on the ice due to the large number of falls a skater usually takes while learning these elements.  The ice surface allows more sliding which disperses the fall energy more efficiently.

Finally, I asked Nick whether PIC skating technique was more like ice skating or more like roller skating.  He said that it's more like ice skating.  Due to the design of the skate, it behaves more like an ice skate than a 4-wheel roller skate, implying that figure skating coaches should be teaching PIC skaters, rather than roller skating coaches.

PIC skates have started to become popular in areas that have limited ice time, particularly outside the United States.  But it's also catching on in the US as evidenced by the top video above.

I've included a few more videos below in case you wanted to see more of the PIC skate in action.

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