I started skateboarding sometime late in 5th grade and quit just over halfway through my freshman year of college, so from early 1985 until early 1993. I started skateboarding again late in July of 2012.

 

The fact that I have now been skating again for as long as I did during my formative years is blowing my mind. In some ways it feels like no time at all has passed and I have to remind myself that in the last eight years I have divorced, remarried, moved four times, changed jobs, gained a not insubstantial amount of weight and grown a beard.

 

In the past eight years I have also watched kids grow up at the skate parks. Some have faded away, some are still ripping. Some have had great success while others are more tragic. To them I will have been just another old guy that was around during their formative years. That will seem like forever to them. For me, it just doesn’t seem like that long. Then again, the actual amount of times I skated in the past eight years is only a small fraction of the amount I skated as a teenager. I skated nearly every day then. As an adult I am lucky if I skate twice a week.

 

Thinking about this blog post I watched a number of old video clips and it is obvious that I have aged. At 38 I was still coasting on the last years of my overly extended youth. It didn’t hurt that for the previous eight years, despite my best efforts at self-sabotage with alcohol and cigarettes, I had also been in great physical shape because of my everyday cycling. 46, well 46 is solidly middle age. I feel it, I look it and I know I don’t have the same physical ability anymore.

 

In some ways my skating has continued to improve over the years. After the first several months of rapid re-learning the speed with which I picked up new tricks tapered off and I spent years just working on basics. Simple things like how to nollie out of a bank or ollie a hip. All of the nollie and half cab variations on banks. The long road to frontside grinds. Nothing as a dramatic as a kickflip, but a slow steady journey to being more comfortable on the board.

 

Proof that I used to be able to ollie up the Chelsea euro. 2013.

In the last eight years I also lost things. I frontside tail slid a ledge in my first few months of skating and I struggled to do that on a curb this spring. After learning to figure eight carve I then fought for a year to 5050, front scratch and rock ’n’ roll in the shallow ends of bowls. After the last few years of only skating smaller things I don’t think I could do that again without putting in substantial work.

 

I’ve learned and lost frontside axle stalls or 5050s on transition more times than I would like to admit. I have to relearn frontside pivots every time I skate. I make sure I do a front rock every time there is a quarter pipe because I’m terrified of losing those.

 

Most annoyingly I have lost my pop. I lost ollieing up the euros at Chelsea a long time ago. I still had it at Owls Head last time I was there but that was for my 45 For 45 part. I struggle to get on any ledges higher than a big curb. Is this because of age, loss of muscle mass, weight gain? It’s probably a combination of all three. If I skate a lot more will ledges feel easier or will I never feel comfortable ollieing high again? That mental fear, the little voice saying “you can’t make it up that”, is as restrictive as any physical limitation.

 

Some days are still great. The last few weekends have been some of the better sessions I have had this year, but more and more days seem to suck. I struggle to do anything and realize all I’ve done for four hours is ollie tiny banks or front scratch on little transition.

 

But skateboarding giveth as well as taketh away and thinking back on the past eight years I have some amazing memories.

 

Hiding in Prospect Park for a few weeks making sure I could ollie again. Failing at Owls Head and going back for revenge the next weekend. Hurricane Sandy and those weeks off as an excuse to check out all the parks. Early weekend mornings (“gentlemen’s hour”) with the Pier 62 bowl crew. Two trips to Garden SK8 in the weeks before it closed. Yearly Old (and Cold) Man Jams. Owls Head becoming my “hangover spot” when I lived down there. A weekend trip to Woodward. Thursday evening after-work mini ramp sessions at Hoboken. Ann Van with Ray. 2ntr visits each winter. Two winters with first the Black Bear Bar bowl and then the mini. Winter Bowl. Our brief infatuation with the East Harlem park. The yearly day after Thanksgiving at Grays Ferry or Paine’s in Philly. The Skatepark of Baltimore for Christmas. MN, ND, SD and AZ parks on trips with my wife. Missions to outer borough or Jersey parks. Upping my game and finding “rain spots” so I could always at least skate flat. The private indoor Cons spot. The Astoria breakfast crew. Spot hunting and two months of solo curb skating during the height of the COVID-19 quarantine.

 

The absolutely highlight of my last few years of skating has been “skamping” trips. I was somehow lucky enough to get invited by a relatively tight knit group of friends to their yearly skate camping trip. I’ve gone with them twice to Connecticut and once to Vermont. We also took a trip to Boston this past winter where we didn’t camp but we did end up skating outdoors in 20-degree weather all day. That was both awesome and stupid.

 

FS tailslide practice, Spring 2020.

So maybe “the real treasure was the friends I made along the way”.

 

The major difference for me skateboarding now, as opposed to as a teen, is the value I place on other people. As a teenager I was competitive. While I hid it, I was envious of those better than me and dismissive of those worse. We were often total dicks to each other. It took the two months of skating alone during quarantine to really make me realize how much I missed other people. I am solitary by nature but I don’t have the monastic drive to just skate alone and focus on learning tricks. I had to film all of my curb sessions because “likes” became my motivation.

 

The community is why I am still skating. I am loath to say “homies” but there is a reason that word is used by skaters. Some are friends, some are acquaintances, some are just random people you recognize and nod at when you roll in to the park. Go somewhere often enough and you end up in a nebulous and shifting crew. People get hurt, quit, drift away. Others arrive. That crew is the soul of skateboarding. Unlike how I was as a teen, I now revel in others success and feed off of that positive energy when it is directed towards me. I skate better when I am with other people, not because I want to show them up or impress them but because, in some odd way, I don’t want to let them down.

 

In the words of the immortal Jeff Grosso:

“When someone skates […] they’re either skating at their personal best or they’re not. And every skateboarder […] can understand that. That’s what skateboarding is, like, are you ripping? If you are ripping, fuck yeah! If you’re not ripping… then why aren’t you ripping?”