Surfing the concrete wave (or chickening out).

by Colin Hunter

Have you ever said to yourself, "Golly, I wish someone would invent a sport that combines the attitude of skateboarding with the zen fluidity of surfing and the speedy insanity of street luge?"  Nah, me neither.

But that thought, or one not wholly unlike it, occurred to the pioneers of longboarding, which is a kind of skateboarding-surfing-street-luge hybrid that has its own burgeoning local subculture.

Longboarding has a pretty self-explanatory name: it's like skateboarding, but the board is long. See? Longboards offer a smooth, responsive ride and they go real fast (downhill longboarders have been clocked at over 90 km/h, at which speed the flux capacitor propels them back to the future).

I recently met up with the K-Dub's longboarding posse, a group of exceedingly friendly guys who offered to lend me a board, some safety gear and give me a longboarding lesson.  I was pumped.  Then I saw the steep, paved, potentially deadly hill they intended to descend.  I chickened out (or, as I prefer to call it, "declined to participate in order to maintain journalisic objectivity").

But the longboarders put on a helluva demonstration, and none of them left any significant amounts of flesh on the concrete. I wrote a story about it, which you can peruse at your leisure by clickity-cliking here.

Or you can watch a fantabulous video made by Record photographer David Bebee, who had the brilliant idea of duct-taping a very expensive video camera to a longboard to capture a board's-eye-view of a speedy descent, followed by a gnarly crash. The camera survived. Barely.  Watch the video, dude.