The longboarding is an action riding on a longer board than a usual skateboard. A longboard has a noticeably greater size than its counterpart, the skateboard. Other main differences within these two boards is that longboards have greater stability, traction, and durability thankfully to the fact that longboards have much larger wheels and lower durometers.
These things and their combination has allowed differentiating longboarding into various disciplines such as downhill, cruiser, slalom, free ride etc.
To understand the differences between some of these main disciplines I will shortly review them.
Downhill Longboarding
Starting with downhill longboarding, it contains riding down the slopes as fast as you can without losing control over your longboard. If you do lose control then the bad times is coming for you, because there are obtained speeds around 80 mph. I’ guessing that nobody would want to slide few meters on his face afterward losing the control over your board. These longboards are usually 95 – 110 cm long and in shape similar to surfboards.
Next in the line is cruising longboards
Which is quite different from downhill longboards in size and shape. These boards are more similar to an 80s skateboards in size and shape, but they also have these big wheels which make cruising more smoothly. It is like a mini longboard in size of between 55 till 76 cm.
People usually choose these mini longboards because they are smaller and more easily to carry around and then put them into a locker or elsewhere.
Other form of longboards is slalom longboards
Slaloming by itself is the action when leaning from inside to outside in order to avoid obstacles. The slalom longboarders usually are competing who will have the best time, but pedestrian slalom is opposite to competing because they are only maneuvering around the obstacles which are in their way in order to get from point A to point B. These three are my favorite disciplines within longboarding.
So other quite interesting facts about longboards are their history and how they have developed.
Longboarding is or also known as sidewalk surfing and it originally came from Hawaii around 1959 when the surfers realized that there are some similar things between skateboarding and surfing. They noticed that the way riding with skateboard is kind a similar with waves motion.
So the idea about skateboards also came from surfers.
The Idea for the surfers was that when they can’t go surfing or the water were way too rough for them they could surf on the ground. In order to understand this topic deeper and became more sophisticated within this field, you would probably want to check the surfing section. After visiting them you will have gained more knowledge about surfing and then will more likely to understand the beginning of the skateboard and furthermore longboard era.
The first skateboards were made at the surfer backyards using plain wooden decks and adding to them rollers from rollerblades. Mostly they were surfboarders either teens. So to reminding about the idea behind this then the goal was to create something in order to be able to surf on the sidewalks. Skateboarding became quickly popular in California as well as in Hawaii among the teens and surfboarders.
During the further development of skateboards, they became shorter and wider for tricks. In 1971 when Richard Stevenson invented the kick tail which revolutionized the whole skateboarding as such because the ability to control the boards got much higher and also there were the first ones who figured out how to airborne.
Later on there was rising necessity for longer boards which became known as ‘’Longboards”.
This was a short story behind the longboarding culture and where do even they came from. Personally, for me it was very interesting to dig in the history of longboards and at first, I would have never imagined that surfing is the real reason why in nowadays we what actually is skateboard and longboard. So all riders out there should thank to those surfers back in the days.
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