Journals of a 30-Year-Old Skateboarder

Hey, my name's Stein and I'm about half-way through my 30th year. I started skateboarding when I was 11, and was considered a "skater" for a number of years. But I abandoned the scene somewhere near my 16th birthday for a number of reasons. I was never any good, but I loved skateboarding and the alt-punk-edge of skating fit my weird-loner-kid personality.

Now I'm going back to skateboarding a total grown-up. I'm still a weird-loner-kid at heart, and I think my reluctance to abandon that aspect of my personality helped bring me back to skating after all these years. But I feel older every day, I don't have half the time or energy I used to have, and I ache in places I didn't know existed--without even exerting myself.

So this 'blog is a record of my experiences. I'll tell you what its like being over 30 and trying to develop skills in the highly technical and challenging sport of skateboarding. I'll talk about the good things I find, and the bad crap that inevitably happens in skating.

The idea of keeping these journals occurred to me as I was laying on my tail in a parking strip, completely out of breath and injured after about 20 minutes of really quite tame skating. I wondered how many other older guys go back to skating, and how many of them stick with it. I thought about how tricky it was for me, earlier that day, to shop for and buy new skate shoes (DC? Fallen? whatever happened to Airwalk as the major brand?) And I realized how utterly thrilling it was to finally land a handful of tricks at 30 that I could never get through at 13.

I should note that about 7 years ago I did buy a new skateboard with the same plan, hoping to get back into the sport, and actually doing pretty well for a couple weeks. Then I had a dumb little spill at the skatepark which resulted in a very painful and frustrating elbow fracture. This was a major problem for me as I was days away from moving overseas at the time to take a new job. Well, the combination of events kept me off of skating for the last half-dozen years, but now I'm committed, and determined to last longer this time.

Alright, well that's probably the longest entry I'll be making for a while. I'm going to instead focus on the equipment I've got, the equipment I need, the tricks I can do, and the tricks I want to do. I'll probably inevitably go back to the best and the worst times skating as a kid, and in doing so I'm sure I'll end up ranting about anything I see as being wrong with skateboarding today.