The community and competition of longboarding: Q&A with Cade Miller
Cade Miller is a self-proclaimed “semi-professional thrill seeker” that has made longboarding his passion. As an avid member of the boarding community, Miller’s life revolves around boarding one way or another, and he enjoys snowboarding and longboarding when he isn’t riding wheels on asphalt.
Via a face-to-face interview, Miller discusses his experiences growing up as part of the longboarding community and how competition can drive an everyday activity from hobby to lifestyle.
When did you start longboarding?
I think around 6th grade? For me it was super unorthodox. Nobody in my area really was into longboarding, it really was this one kid Tyler that drove our friend group to try this thing.
What made you keep coming back to it?
I’ll be honest, I didn’t at first. Eating pavement isn’t cool. I never was the best out of the group, there were always kids better than me, but because of that they’d force me to learn switch and toe side and all that. The competition, the camaraderie.
We also kept in touch with what was poppin’ with boarding at the time. I remember we all had a phase where we were all buying different wheels and stuff like that. There was a company based in Australia called Remember and I rocked those for a long time. So there was kind of this cool culture behind all of it. Not to brag, but we felt like we started something. Like I said, no one was really into longboarding in our area and we took it really seriously.
What do you mean when you say you “took it seriously?”
We really went all out, like, to a stupid degree. And it was kind of funny because since we were all middle schoolers we’d have to have our moms drive us to these crazy hills and every time the mom would be worried about us, and honestly, I was worried about us. There were plenty of times when we would bomb hills and I thought one of us were literally going to die. A lot of cars around corners and face-planting into dirt, but we still did it because we believed we lived that “skater till I die” life.
So I’m guessing you’re pretty good at longboarding. What does “practice” look like to you? What is getting better?
I’m not sure if I’d use the word practice. When you are part of a community like boarding, you just do it, and you push each other. The biggest “practice” we’d do was like, for example, we’d practice slides going downhill because that’s cool. We mostly did stand-ups because that’s cooler than grabbing and sitting. I keep repeating the word cool but that’s really what drove us — to look cool in front of our friends.
If we really wanted to push ourselves and check who was doing the best we’d pull out a measuring tape and see who can slide the farthest. Longboarding wheels are made out of urethane so we measured, as we called it, “thane lines” and that’s where the competition kicked in and we’d really force each other to get better that way.
I want to bring this word up to you — adrenaline. You’re probably familiar with that idea. Talk to me a little bit about that kind of emotion, or just all the things you feel when you’ve put yourself in that kind of situation.
So for me, it’s all about confidence. If you’re going down a hill very fast you gotta know what you’re doing. The adrenaline kicks in when you’re unsure, when you start getting the speed wobbles and all you can think about is how f***ed you are. You have to put those emotions aside and just really focus on getting down the hill.
If you end up succeeding, you end up with a lot more adrenaline because the anxiety, the nerves that built up during that short span. Also personally, there was a lot more adrenaline involved because where we went, a lot of people didn’t like us. Nobody was longboarding in Charlotte and these neighborhoods really hated us. So with all that anxiety in my mind as we road down, the payoff was just that much better.
Is there an all-time favorite moment or experience?
There was this one hill that was like, legendary to us. We’d just seen videos of other people going to it from our community, and it was just super steep and on top of this giant hill in the local mountains, and it was really sketchy because it was in a private neighborhood.
Again, that mindset that we saw from skate culture of riding that line between cool and stupid drove us to try it. One day we convinced a mom to shuttle us to the top again and again, and it was a blast until the owner of the property came barreling at us on his truck on started just screaming at us. I don’t think he realized we were kids with all the gear we had on and the entire time my heart was pumping because I thought we were in real trouble. In the end we got it figured out but that was insane.
That kind of stuff is how I would describe the essence of boarding, adventure, whatever you want to call it. It’s putting together the friends, the competition, the uncertainty of success, the anxiety that you’re doing something wrong or illegal, the payoff of success and impressing your group. It’s special.
