CrossFit Athletic Group

In true Jack fashion, he was not around the gym on Sunday to be greeted and congratulated on his Athlete of the Spring award. As it turns out, he was in Tennessee on a longboarding adventure, sporting his new Champions Club race suit. Here's what he had to say about it.

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by, Jack Trastevere

Chris asked me to do a write up about some of the longboarding stuff I’ve been up to recently.  I’m a crap writer but I like talking about all things skateboarding so let’s give it a go.  Sometime last year I had approached Chris about becoming a “sponsored” rider for Champions Club.  Chris was all about it.  I found a Pakistani company that quoted a full leather racing suit with all custom patchwork on the low low. Chris would put some money towards the suit and in return I had it made with Champions Club colors and logo.  The result was nothing short of incredible, the suit fit me like a glove and all of its designs were on point.  In addition to this I can now to some degree consider myself a sponsored rider and from my very own Crossfit gym.  Now I cannot say for certain but to my knowledge this is totally unheard of.  A Crossfit sponsored longboarder?  We’re making history here people.  One case that comes close is a fellow longboarder Phil who is sponsored by the sandwich shop that he works at.  Phil in leathers with a sandwich logo on the chest, now that is something I’d like to see but I digress.

Since race season and skating season in general are in full swing I’ve been getting on my board as much as possible whether in the form of skating whatever small hills we have in the area, making road trips to bigger hills and various races, or just cruising around the lake at stony creek.  This summer marks the start of my third race season and I have already competed at two races this year.  The first was “Rage at the Ridge” which was a full grip course (no drifting into turns) that is about a mile long and has a top speed in the high 40’s.  The video where I am wearing my leathers is a practice run from this race.  The second race I’ve competed in this year was an outlaw race in Tennessee dubbed “Ol Man Jones Outlaw” (not sanctioned by the city and on an open road).  We left early Friday and eight and a half hours later we found ourselves at the first rip of the weekend.  

Charlie took us to a run he knew about called “Clifford” named for the cliffs on the right side of the road that would be a real bummer to fall off of.  The raw run where I am not wearing my leathers is from Clifford, the reason you see no cliffs is because I had opted to only skate the top half of the run which lacks those scary drop offs.  The next day was the actual Ol Man Jones race.  This was a much more challenging hill that required a minimum of 5 drifts or slides to make it down safely.  The course consisted of a left sweeper and 3 hairpin turns and was seriously awesome.  I had made the mistake of taking my first run without putting my leathers on and ended with some serious road rash on my left butt cheek, not fun.  Unfortunately I don’t have any footage of the hill but there were a few folks filming with a drone and doing follow runs so hopefully some good edits will surface soon.  

In the next few months my goal is to skate and race as much as possible.  There are a few races I have in mind like “Mounds Down” in Wisconsin and “Soldiers of Downhill” in Ohio but no plans set in stone yet because organizing road trips last minute is pretty much the skater way.  In summary, I’ve been having tons of fun skating so far this year and count on even more good times to come.  If anyone has questions I’d be happy to answer because honestly I could talk about this stuff all day.