What is longboarding?
I’m sure you are familiar with the ever-popular skateboard. Skateboarding has become more and more technical over the years with skaters pushing each other to do ever more complicated tricks with their boards. Skateboarding becomes more and more complex as you become more advanced and start combining tricks to perform more technical manoeuvres.
So where does longboarding fit in? Well, a longboard is simply put just a long skateboard. Your typical longboard will vary in length from between 90 and 150 cm (35.4-60 inches) or even longer. Why do we call it longboarding and not just skateboarding? Longboarding has now evolved so much that it has its own different styles for which different shapes and sizes of boards are needed, hence it has its own classification system. There are longboarders that are into downhill skateboarding, freeride, carving/cruising, sliding and even trick riding.
Each style requires a different style of board. Other than normal skateboards, you’ll find mostly that longboards do not have a raised “nose” or “tail” on the board which is necessary for normal skateboarding for performing the various technical tricks. You could say that longboards are geared more towards just cruising with your board instead of performing tricks. I would say the more popular disciplines of this sport is downhill skating and sliding. Downhill skateboarding involves the skaters wearing leather suits, very similar to those worn by bikers. They go down hills or mountain passes at very high speeds (speeds up to and over 115km/h / 71mph). This has become quite a competitive sport. With events being held worldwide. These skaters obviously wear all kinds of other protective gear like helmets, knee and elbow pads and also gloves. The gloves have a plastic puck on the palms and sometimes also the fingers. This assists the skater in actually putting his hand down on the riding surface in order to make sharp turns or to perform sliding manoeuvres to break their speed.
When simply freeriding and sliding, skaters will most often only wear helmets and gloves. Sliding is a discipline on its own where skaters perform all kinds of high-speed sliding manoeuvres with their boards which involves them putting their hands down on the riding surface.
Some more information can be found at the following links:
Longboarding on Wikipedia
A brief history of longboarding on Hubpages
