Stumbled upon another good article about older guys like myself getting back into skating. Check it out below….
Back on board in Marin: More middle-aged skateboarders braving injuries for the thrills
Paul Liberatore
Posted: 09/07/2009 11:34:18 PM PDT
Bill Hanley, a 39-year-old Mill Valley bartender, rides his skateboard at the Novato skate park. (IJ photo/Robert Tong)
Bill Hanley started skateboarding when he was a kid and he’s never stopped, even as he rolls into middle-age.
“I’ve been skating for almost 30 years, since I was 7 or 8, and I’ll be 40 next year,” he said. “It’s a passion.”
Hanley, a bartender who lives in Mill Valley, doesn’t share his passion with his children because he doesn’t have kids.
“Just a worried wife,” he said. “She worries about bone breaks.”
And for good reason.
“That’s happened plenty of times,” he confessed, ticking off a list of injuries, including “little concussions here and there,” a broken arm and a broken kneecap that kept him out of work for eight months.
“People tell me, ‘You’re 40 years old, you’ve got to stop,'” he said. “But there’s guys playing football at 40. Look at Brett Favre. He’s back in the game because he loves it.”
Once a sport for preteens and teenagers, skating is attracting an older crowd, albeit one where a 35-year-old is considered a geezer.
“The kids tell me I’m as old as their dad,” Hanley said. “But they give me a lot of respect. A lot of friends my age are still doing it.”
He often skates in empty swimming pools with buddies he grew up with in Mill Valley – 40-year-old Royce Nelson and 39-year-old Justin Coughlin.
They are part of a wave of men in their 30s and 40s from California to New York who are either taking up skateboarding after years away from it or they never stopped, despite the increased risk of injury with advancing years.
Some get back
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into it through their kids, and sometimes it’s the other way around.
“For the most part, it’s guys who haven’t done it for 20 years, but were real into it when they were 15 or so and then their kids renew their interest,” said Ben Young, who works at Proof Lab, the surf and skate shop in Tamalpais Valley that has a skateboard half pipe in back. “But sometimes these guys get their kids into it.”
They’re doing it for exercise, to bond with their sons (and sometimes daughters) or to recapture the spills and thrills of their youth.
Tom Max, 38, who works in operations support at Comcast in the Bay Area, bonds with his 4-year-old daughter, Frankie, over skating.
His wife bought Frankie her first skateboard two years ago. Now Max has turned his love of skating into a side-job, consulting for skate park design firms, including a 67,000-square-foot skate park that will open soon in San Jose.
Old Man Army, a company that designs and sells skateboard equipment for older skaters, is co-owned by 39-year-old Mike Furst of Tempe, Ariz. His co-owner is a friend he’s been skating with since they were teenagers.
The company markets to people like himself, selling wider boards with wheelbases that provide better stability.
Old Man Army boasts 800 members posting on its Web site. They discuss the difficulties of balancing skating with family life and the impact the sport has on their older, stiffer bodies.
The “MASH Unit” section of the site features graphic pictures of scrapes, bruises, scars and X-rays, as well as updates on skaters’ various injuries and surgeries.
And there are a lot of injuries. Dr. Christopher Ahmad, an orthopedic surgeon at Columbia University Medical Center, warns that older skaters need to condition their bodies before taking up a strenuous sport – a phenomenon he sees mostly associated with skiing, which shares some of the motions with skateboarding.
“Impact activities and high twist activities (like skateboarding), where your body is changing direction rapidly, pose the biggest stress for joints,” which is a big risk for injury, he said.
Skate parks first began cropping up in the late-1970s and early-1980s, when many of these now-middle aged skaters were in their teens, but interest in the sport faded.
But starting in the 1990s, with the advent of ESPN’s X Games and skateboarder Tony Hawk’s videogames, parks have again been sprouting nationwide. And skaters, primarily men who left their boards behind when they went to college or got married, are getting back in the game.
Since 1995, skateparks have been built in Novato, Mill Valley, Corte Madera, Bolinas and San Anselmo. In 2003, the County of Marin built the largest skatepark of them all at McInnis Park in San Rafael – 25,000 square feet of concrete bowls and ramps on a hilltop overlooking San Pablo Bay.
Nik Dawson, 36, is a member of the Concretins, a collective of 30- and 40-something skaters who convene at parks around Louisville, Ky., for regular skating sessions on weekend mornings – before the kids show up.
On their Web site, the Concretins post pictures of homemade ramps, and pictures of their children. Dawson recently posted a picture of his newborn son, Indiana, to whom he hopes to pass on the skating bug.
“If he wants to play football, he can play football, and I’ll have to learn how to play football,” he says. “But skating is definitely something we could do together.”
Neil Munshi of Columbia News Service contributed to this story. Contact Paul Liberatore via e-mail at liberatore@marinij.com; follow him on Twitter at http://twitter.com/LibLarge.
Original Article posted at http://www.marinij.com/lifestyles/ci_13289322
