There two main problems of being 35 and skating. The first is finding a place to skate where there are no kids around. The second is that I weigh about 35 pounds more than I did in High school, this is a lot harder on the knees. I can't seem to skate two days in a row without my knees feeling strained. Being heavier, also makes the falls harder, and bruises seem to take longer to heal now.
Sweet Concrete
My skills are strictly old school. I can go up and down on banks and transitions and I can ollie, and that's it, no flip tricks. In the late eighties flip tricks were seen as aesthetically suspect, you were supposed to keep your feet on the board. Today's skateboard tricks are incredibly complicated and impressive, but I can't seem to shake the old school aesthetic sensibility.
I seem to do unfortunate things with my tongue when skateboarding.
Ben "Ollie" O'Brien
I don't think it will ever be possible to fully explain to someone born after 1985 what life was like before the internet. Being a skateboarder in Buffalo meant that Thrasher and Transworld Skateboarding magazines were the only way to get information about skating. When I open up an old issue now, every photo and ad is utterly familiar, having been studied intensely and repeatedly. I remember that I bought the issue of Transworld on the left in Flagstaff, Arizona while on a 5 week western road trip with my family (I was 13). I remember trying to savor it, not even opening it the first day, knowing it had to get me through weeks of sitting in the car (and not skating). What I didn't know at the time was that Transworld was making news in the world of graphic design under the art direction of David Carson (later of Raygun). Back then we saw Thrasher as being authentic (on newsprint) and Transworld as being a bit too slick and commercial. The fact that Transworld was brilliantly breaking every rule of design in magazine publishing was not something we understood.
