Skateboarding in L-Town

Back in L-Town where I grew up (that's Loveland Colorado for anyone who doesn't know), skateboarding was one of the top sports for non team sport enthusiasts such as myself. I had played soccer and was a part of Club United but as I got older sports like rollerblading, skateboarding, and snowboarding really caught my interest. I like to push myself and really feel free.. fast, like I'm flying. To this day I enjoy free-running or "parkour" which is the french name for bouncing and flipping and sailing around urban structures. It's almost like freestyle gynmastics and it's a blast. Back at CU, I would run around the grass hills and brick walls practicing flips and cartwheels. At the height of my free running I could run up a wall and do a back flip! One time I landed on my face doing this and got a big grass stain across my cheek, but I was lucky to never suffer too much injury. I made friend with some other parkour afficianados and we would boost eachother and spot when trying new things. With the help of these great friends I learned how to do a ground based gainer, which is basically akin to running forward and jumping up into the air and then doing a backflip while still going forward, landing, and then speeding away. It was super sick to say the least.

So anyways, this post is really about skateboarding and my friends Silas Siegrist, Chris Garcin, and Brad Galloway. Back at Loveland High we used to skate all around together, mostly in the parking lot and occasionally off stairs and at the Amphitheatre or "Amp" as we called it. One of the craziest places we would go was TVHS (Thompson Valley High) where there was a gigantic stair gap (which Si makes in the video... after falling a few times. The police would sometimes catch us grinding parking heads or waxing curbs and we would get in trouble (this is the retirement community of Loveland after all, not the ski area!) but for the most part we could do what we wanted. So eventually Loveland passed a bill to create a skate park and finally we had somewhere real to go! It wasn't great, nothing compared to Boulder (which had a great wooden park called Scott Carpenter - since replaced with a cement park) or the two Fort Collins skate parks, but it was better than nothing and for most of these years we were too young to drive so L-Town was all we had. Just after I created my snowboarding movie called Hidden, Chris Brad and Si made a video of their own which featured Si's top notch skating ability (he was definitely the best skater among us).

Chris was getting into broadcasting at LHS and had access to Loveland High's recording equipment and editing software that was used in the morning show (which of course was on all on a Mac, these were the years just before the ipod released) and the effects he employed for this movie were way beyond what we had done on Hidden or what we could have done on a PC setup. Enjoy the movie while you're here. I miss these guys but we had such a blast skating around and being friends, I'm really thankful for the great times skating with Si, the fun parties that Chris would throw on the lake and all of the trampoline time we got in.