Skateboarding starts shrouded in mystery.  We do know that it first started in the 1950s, when all across California surfers got the idea of trying to surf the streets. No one really knows who made the first board -- instead, it seems that several people came up with similar ideas at the same time. Several people have claimed to have invented the skateboard first, but nothing can be proved, and skateboard remains a strange spontaneous creation. These first skateboarders started with wooden boxes or boards with roller skate wheels slapped on the bottom. Like you might imagine, a lot of people got hurt in skateboard's early years! It was a sport just being born and discovered, so anything went. The boxes turned into planks, and eventually companies were producing decks of pressed layers of wood -- similar to the skateboard decks of today. The technology and the skills in skateboarding came together to create a growing and very interesting sport called Skateboarding.

 

Skateboarding can be enjoyed by kids as young as two years, but the majority of pro skaters' range from early teens to early twenties. Most skateboarders don't train in any usual sense of the word, and they don't even think about their diet. Skaters just do what they love to do: skate, all the time. Skateboarding is fun, and when having fun is the goal, it never seems like training. Of course many skateboarders do other things for fun as well, such as surfing and snowboarding, which is actually extreme sports cross-training.