Longboarding and NYUAD

Longboarding started in the 1950s. Surfers in Hawaii, an island state of the United States in the Pacific ocean, wanted to practice their sport when the waves were flat. As time went on, all forms of skating developed a reputation as sports for outsiders and rebels willing to take dangerous risks while also becoming one of the largest commercial industries to date. By the late 90s, longboarding had developed a complex vocabulary of style, including downhill, freeriding, freestyle, slalom, cruising, and carving. Skaters have reshaped the classic longboard, essentially surfboard on wheels, to fit these different styles and push the boundaries for new ones. The board you will hear throughout this walk is the product of such innovation, with a board shape that allows for the length of the board to change and wheels which are square.

On this campus, most skaters use their boards for transportation. Their style is cruising and carving, a safe and simple style meant for maintaining speed and minimizing effort over long distances. The boards most people use are either tiny boards, called penny boards, or simple longboards. A few of us, though, prefer freeriding, a version of downhill which breaks up the momentum of the ride with slides and simple tricks that add flair to keeping speed under control. For us, cruising across campus is a daily intermission to the thrill of bombing the smooth hills behind the buildings on the Northeast side of campus.

Have you ever noticed the texture under your feet, the bumps created by the trapezoid tiles? Every outdoor walking space on this campus is covered with either square or trapezoidal tiles, creating a surface over which a board can ride while making that ride incredibly bumping. To navigate these tiles, skaters have to pick out certain micropaths, called lines, that will not leave their joints exhausted from the vibrations. For instance, skating in parallel to any of the lines creating by these trapezoid tiles is much smoother than skating across them. This pattern also creates much less sound.