Finding the Spot
What I enjoy most about skateboarding is the way that it changes one’s perspective of their environment. When you’re traveling on a skateboard, going from spot to spot; suddenly the city, from basic things like a sewer cover to architectural masterpieces, gain another purpose. The basic definition of a bench changes and, suddenly, it’s no longer a place for those walking past to sit down and rest or pass the time, it’s an object that the skater uses to express themselves; to express the fluidity of motion that’s inherent in the the roll up, the trick, and the roll away. Skateboarding is wonderful because it brings recognition to parts of a city—art and architecture—that people pass by everyday on their way to work or a date or something else in the vortex of appointments that often take up so much of our life.
If it weren’t for skateboarding, legendary spots like Love Park in Philadelphia, Embarcadero in San Francisco, or The Brooklyn Banks in New York City, wouldn’t be much more than a place where drug addicts go for a hit, bums go to sleep, and “proper citizens” avoid out of fear of something they don’t know.
For the skaters, the spots they skate are places that become shrines to the sport they love. They become places they go to everyday to hang out with their closest friends, drink coffee (or malt liquor out of brown paper bags), people watch, and to learn fakie tre flips. Whether it’s an unappreciated sculpture, a gnarly handrail, or just a grimey and uneven flat ground (see: Tompkins Square Park , New York City), these places, once skated and lurked, have now become spots. More hallowed than one’s home, these spots are the foundations for a day outside, kicking, pushing, ollieing, kickflipping, drinking, and doing anything with your friends in the pursuit of fun, footage, and progression.
One of the most wonderful feelings in the world is ripping one spot with your friends, the transition period getting to the next spot, and ripping that one as well. It motivates the sport because it creates this fun day hanging out with your homies while pushing each other to try something gnarlier at each spot you visit.
I’m a skateboarder that became a runner, as my life transitioned from the constant pursuit of ledge tricks to the pursuit of a faster mile, the effort required and the constant need to prove my speed via road races and personal bests started to take their toll on me. Running, unlike skateboarding, is primarily ground in training and following a plan every week in pursuit of progress in one’s fitness. For months, my life would be one long run, followed by a tempo run, followed by a track session and on, and on, until the day of some target race where I would run for a certain amount of time, feel pain, get an official time, a medal, and then go home.
Especially when one gets to a level in running where racing is their primary form of expressing progress, this regime becomes life. And for some, it’s a fine way to live. I can’t fault them for that because, for me; for so long, this was a way of life.
However, this past winter, the pursuit of speed started to become less important. My love for the training and the feeling of my body getting stronger—despite the fact that this feeling is one of the most wonderful things about running—started to disappear. It wasn’t necessarily my love for running because I knew that I wanted to run and loved the feeling of freedom one gets when they get out and run a few miles. It was my love for the other parts inherent in being a runner; the training, the quest for personal bests, that I started to look at with noticeable disdain. I started to fear that this would ultimately progress to a disdain for running altogether.
I needed to prevent this from happening.
It’s the freedom of these sports that’s most important to me. It’s the freedom of being able to push myself alongside my friends, the pursuit of spots where we can hang out and enjoy our sport; the freedom to go anywhere we wanted and to turn our environment, no matter how dull, into something important in that period of time that we’re there, that I love the most. This is why I loved skateboarding and still love skateboarding and will always love skateboarding.
I realized then that the exploration possibilities of running are far greater than anything I could’ve done on my skateboard.
Most of the people I run with are capable of 26.2 miles on any given day. I couldn’t touch that kind of distance on my skateboard.
Suddenly, the pursuit of ledges and benches became the pursuit of hills, long stretches of straight road, 400m traffic circles, and anything in my city that I could turn into a challenge.
Instead of running 10 miles from my front door, some pre-determined route, then back to my front door, maybe I can run 10 miles to a series of hills with my friends and just hang out at that spot doing time trials up and down these hills and pushing ourselves to go faster and faster, using our city in ways no one else would to progress in the sport we love and, most importantly, have fun.
I want to go on runs to a spot, get there, eat some food, drink some water, maybe even have a coffee, whatever, and just hammer out some repeats or intervals at this spot.
I want to recreate the feeling of exploration and expression I found so appealing when I used to spend entire days with my homies on a skateboard, with my current passion—which is running.
I want to create spots that other runners can hold as hallowed grounds to training that isn’t an Olympic Stadium or a blue line on a closed course in Boston, Massachusetts. I want spots in the city that I live in and love that my friends and other runners could look to as a place to congregate, hang out, and push each other to go faster and harder.
I need to lose the absolute necessity of following a training plan, or getting an xx amount of miles in, and turn training into something similar to those days skating. I want running to be about exploring, hanging out, having fun, and pushing.
In the end, I don’t know if this will be the end of my PB days or not. The goal is to turn my city, from the most mundane spots to the most visited or the most beautiful, into places where I can explore and progress. I’m trying to make running exciting and break away from the cycle of training plans that have started draining the life away from something I love. Whether or not it leads to fast times or not is irrelevant to me to be honest. I just love running and I want to stay in love with running.
I just didn’t think I’d find the answer from skateboarding.
By Jeggi Elinzano
Thanks to Tom Hull, Melissa Fehr and Robyn Arzon for the flicks.