Jesse Heidenfeld hit his head while longboarding and fissured his skull in four places. Adam Snider got 18 stitches for a gash down his arm that revealed his bone. Emily Adler slammed her face into a curb when she fell off her longboard going 30 miles per hour.
“I had a vein that broke and leaked into my eye, so my eye was red for a while and I was bruised, but nothing broke, so that was good,” said Adler, a sophomore studying political science.
Snider, a freshman also majoring in political science, said he typically skates between 30 and 50 mph, and his favorite place to skate is down La Luz Road. He goes as fast as a car on the freeway, and he said injuries like these are fairly common. But they have not deterred him from longboarding. At a competition in Rio Rancho last week, he won in the category of “Worst Road Rash.” Heidenfeld, a junior studying film, said the term is used to describe scrapes from falling on pavement.
“Road rash is the best, as opposed to rolling and tumbling and breaking things,” Heidenfeld said. “I would much rather lose some skin than break some bones.”
Snider said longboarding differs from shortboarding — typical skateboarding — in that longboarders carve down hills and speed race, whereas shortboarders focus on more technical tricks.
“I think that shortboards will always be cooler than longboards because you can do flips and stuff,” he said. “We go like 55 miles per hour, but that’s just being stupider, if you think about it — you’re risking your life a lot more.”
Although they have their differences, Heidenfeld said the two types of skating are starting to be combined. He said longboarders go off jumps they call “kickers,” and shortboarders are learning more fluid, dance-like moves.
“All of skateboarding is coming together and merging into one thing, and there isn’t really a sectioning of it anymore, at least in the circles I run in,” he said. “The big thing now is free riding, which is just going down a hill, hanging out and sliding.”
Sliding occurs when the wheels of the skateboard break traction, similar to when a car peels out. Snider and his friends perform slides and turns down the Medical Arts Avenue hill, making sure to stop before they hit the traffic on Lomas Boulevard.
The longboarders attract attention wherever they go. Some people are curious about the activity, while some get nervous when Snider weaves between moving cars. One man suggests the skaters make a ramp to launch them over the highway.
“You are making me so nervous,” said a woman in a minivan driving down Encino Place. “Don’t die.”
Recreational skating outside of skate parks is not permitted by law in Albuquerque, but Heidenfeld said skaters are rarely ticketed. There are hardly any sponsored races in Albuquerque, so he said they hold “outlaw races” that are not approved by law.
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Everybody pays $5 and the winner takes the pot. One New Mexico skate shop brings in skaters from Australia, France and Canada to skate, and even those races are not legal. Heidenfeld said they rarely have problems in the surrounding neighborhoods, either.
“We have a sign that we bring to neighborhoods that says, ‘Thanks for letting us use your neighborhood to skate,’ and we hang it up to cover our ass, but also to say we’re not douchebag hoodlums,” he said.
Snider said one of the biggest draws of the sport is the adrenaline rush of racing at high speeds, and Heidenfeld said the adrenaline improves his concentration.
“It’s kind of a constant nervousness,” Heidenfeld said. “When you’re going really fast with a lot of people, it really forces you to focus, and I guess it’s controlling that nervousness, honing it down into something you can control easily.”
Heidenfeld said longboarding is not just a recreational activity; it translates into other areas of his life.
“I’m very type A and I work very well under pressure, so that’s why I have the hobby,” Heidenfeld said. “I do all my work at the last minute, like everybody else does, so I don’t freak out about it because it could be worse: I could be going down a hill at 30 miles per hour and almost dying.”
Snider said that risking his life allows for self-reflection.
“I think you have a closer relationship with yourself,” he said. “Living in the now, doing what you want.”
