James MacLaren

Sometimes I am taken aback by how things come in and out your life. Lately I've been thinking again about riding a longboard. Longboards were my first surfing love and I took well to the laid back style of longboarding. From fading on the takeoff, to nose riding and big turns off the top, longboarding taught me a lot about catching waves and understanding the physics of surfing. Eventually though I felt the need to learn how to ride a shortboard, which is what I've been doing for the last couple of years.

Today it's below freezing and flat so I'm sitting around sipping on a Moosehead green and looking for longboarding videos on you tube and low and behold I come across this little gem below. It's the first inna four part series about the physics of noseriding by James MacLaren. The funny part is that the narrator is someone who I used to see at Patrick Air Force base, mostly drinking beer and talkin shit on the boardwalk and sometimes in the water. His signature move back in those days when I used to see him around was standing in the middle of his longboard facing backwars towards the tail -feet together and completely confident and in perfect trim. There were several times that I saw this guy doing the backwards trim on heavy head high days. Incredible.