- Charitable distance skating
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Charitable distance skating refers to long distance travel on a skateboard with an associated charitable fundraising effort.
Perhaps one of the most famous boards in the world, Elsa (a rolls rolls carbon longboard) has over 10,000 km under her wheels. Elsa was pushed from Perth to Brisbane between August 20, 2006 and January 22, 2007 by Dave Cornthwaite, of BoardFree, at a distance of 5823 km, which broke American Jack Smith's previous distance record by 994 km.[citation needed] Cornthwaite was also the first person to skateboard the length of Britain, travelling from John O'Groats to Lands End between April 30, 2006 and June 2, 2006, a total distance of 895.9 miles.
During the same summer of 2006, four young Canadians pushed their way across the second longest land mass in the world. Beginning on the waterfront in Halifax, Nova Scotia, the Push for the Cure pushed more than 7000 km to Vancouver, British Columbia. The journey took just over five months and raised more than $80,000 for the Canadian Breast Cancer Foundation.
Many other charitable longboard journeys have taken place, including Nat Halliday et al.'s skate of the length of New Zealand in 2007, Sam Benson's Beatswalkin journey from Devon, England to France in 2007, and Ben Stiff's record-breaking length of Britain skate in 2008.
In more recent times, charitable distance skating has been gaining a lot of momentum, in tandem with the rapidly-growing popularity of longboarding worldwide. One of the most highly publicized ultra skate-journeys (at least within the online skating community) has been Long Treks on Skate Decks, comprising Paul Kent, Aaron Enevoldsen and Adam Colton. In 2009, the group skated 2400 km through South America, from Peru to Bolivia. In 2010, they completed yet another 2000 km journey through Morocco, raising funds for Art à la Carte, a Canadian volunteer society that provides acute care cancer patients with a choice of art for their hospital rooms. The blogs from these skating teams and the video coverage of their epic trips on sites such as Youtube (see http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P307uzCmNgo) have helped spawn a brethren across the globe and inspired many others to go on similar charitable trips. One such team is Skate4Hope, comprising members from Singapore. Skate4Hope completed a 120 km maiden round-island voyage in July 2010, and has plans to skate from Vietnam to Thailand in 2011, a journey that is in excess of 1000 km.
See also
- Long Distance (Skateboard) Pumping
- Longboard (skateboard)
References
- BoardFree on BBC - Dave Cornthwaite's BoardFree Australia journey on film
- Push for the cure - Charitable distance skating
- Boardfree - World record breaking charitable distance skating
- PavedWave - Charitable distance
- Skatefurther - Website dedicated to long distance skateboarding
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