“No one wants to look silly,” Rod Whinesand says as he uses ski poles to propel himself and his long skateboard forward.
“Some days I think, ‘I don’t want to do this,’” he adds, “but it’s so much fun.”
Gravel
crackles under his wheels. “No one has laughed yet. They just smile and
wave, or stare,” he says with a grin as a young boy peers from an
apartment window.
“You just push once with one foot and gain
momentum,” he says as he mobilizes with his strange rowing motion. This
movement – incorporating skateboard and ski technologies – is what
Whinesand has dubbed “landboarding.”
In his younger years,
Whinesand maneuvered a conventional skateboard. “My knees and legs gave
out with age,” he says. His passion for skateboarding evolved into what
he calls a more “mature” form of recreation.
Like most great
inventions, Whinesand’s came to him rather organically, triggered by a
fluke visit to the dump, where he purchased ski rods for two dollars.
“Everyone
wants to be the first to do something,” he says, before tacking on a
measure of humility: “But for all I know, this has been done before.”
Landboarding
is not for the impatient, nor anyone looking to perform some fancy
tricks. The heavy weight of the board restricts that.
“The
technique is to pace yourself,” says Whinesand as he rolls down a
residential street in Seaside. He landboards five times a week – from
his home in Marina to his job at Whole Foods in Monterey – going about
6 miles an hour. This day it took him roughly an hour and a half to
ride from Marina to neighboring Seaside, though he contends his speed
has increased with practice and endurance.
“It’s great for your
arms and legs,” he exhales, sweat beading on his brow. “I get my heart
rate up to about 165 to 175, but at the same time it’s relaxing.” He
catches his breath as he sits down and rolls on his board.
Despite
his modest speeds, Whitesand plans to improve his apparatus by adding
some form of brakes. He doesn’t know how he might do that yet – and he
has a confounding priority: mastering how to travel uphill.
A
version of local celebrity has accompanied Whitesand’s new passion.
“People approach me when I’m not landboarding and say, ‘Aren’t you that
guy with the ski poles and the skateboard?’” he laughs. “I like that
the word’s getting out there. This would be even more fun if I had a
landboarding crew.”
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