My longboards have been gathering dust all winter.
+M1 is at ice-skating camp.
+Rachel and M2 are swimming.
+The ice is off the roads.
= An afternoon of soul-carving down the long slow hill in front of our house.
It’s spring!
Image CC-BY by AMagill
There’s a great thread up on grinding.be that mashes together skater culture, architecture and grinder culture. Go check it out!
(Skater image CC-BY-NC-ND by Ignacio Nuñez C.)
(Grinder Symbol copyright is probably held down by Avatar. Used here totally without permission, but go buy lots of Warren‘s books.)
As seems to be happening to an increasing number of people, I have been evangelized by James Peters and company over at Pavedwave into building a longboard optimized for pumping (where you use a surfing motion to propel the board, rather than pushing off with your back foot.) As a father and an old fart, I can’t get much joy out of aggressive hill-bombing or sharing the road with cars, so surfing bike trails sounded just about perfect.
My RoeRacing Mermaid LDP deck arrived the other day in a giant flat cardboard envelope, and I bolted on some Carver CX trucks and some giant sticky 3dm Avila wheels and went out to give it a try.
I spent the whole session howling with laughter (which was probably creepy to watch, given that I was all alone,) but I’ve got the thing self-propelling (slowly) up and down small hills, and I can surf parking lots without ever putting a foot down. It will be a long time before I’m logging respectable mile times, but who cares!
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