austin skate notes

Alright. It’s going to be treats today, kids. The only trick is the costume ASN is wearing today.

For starters, James sent me these two videos of his expedition to the Cayman Islands. The first clip is James taking a short run in one of the cradles. This other one is of Kevin Trayhan feeding some tarpon. Some members of the team found plane tickets for $300 round trip… And, while I’m throwing up these YouTube links, here’s a fun clip I shot of lil’ moot liberating his own bicycle from a kryptonite lock.

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Skaters and skateboard sympathizers living in Williamson County have the opportunity right now to help get a skatepark built in their area. Although it’s not mentioned on the Williamson County Bond website, there is $300,000 included in the Parks bond package for building a skatepark in their regional county park. Since Cedar Park bailed on building a skatepark due to oldsters complaining about teenagers invading their neighborhood parks, they kicked $125,000 to the county, which will boost the budget to $425,000 if voters approve this bond. Early voting is taking place now through Friday and all you have to do is show up at any Williamson County polling station with your drivers license if you’re a registered voter.

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This past winter skaters and bmx’ers attended public input meetings to lobby for public skatepark funds to be included in the next city bond. Having already convinced Travis County commissioners and voters to allocate $500,000 in last year’s county bond election, the momentum was in force for the city bond lobbying campaign. This vocal crowd showed up with such force at each of the input meetings, that city staffers asked leaders of the Austin Public Skatepark Action Committee to limit their speakers to just a few advocates. Frequently, people who were attending the meetings in support of other issues like the downtown public library would dedicate a portion of their speeches to supporting the skatepark campaign.

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Perhaps fearing for his safety, ex-Mayor Bruce Todd enlisted two APD officers to escort him to August’s public input meeting at City Hall where he promoted his case for a law requiring all adult bicyclists to wear helmets. He rallied perhaps 20 people to make emotional pleas that a helmet law would save lives or at a minimum reduce health care costs for the city. The City Council chose not to act on his proposed legislation.

Now Todd is back and he’s signed up current Mayor Will Wynn to make it happen. Wynn and Todd have convinced doctors at Brackenridge and Seton hospitals to keep a running tally of how many people are admitted with head injuries suffered while riding bicycles. They will also track over the next 12 months the costs of these injuries and whether or not each patient was wearing a helmet.

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Originally I had committed to ride the MS 150 as a personal test of endurance. I hadn’t pushed myself like that in a long time. Turning 37 on October 7th, I thought this bike ride would be a good way to check that I wasn’t slipping. So over the past few months, I cobbled together an old Peugeot from parts at the Yellow Bike Project and trained with late-night rides all around Austin. I was regularly clocking 35-mile routes up to Fry’s, down to Barton Springs, then back home.

This past Saturday’s start in San Antonio was really exciting. There were 3,000 participants all lined up with their bikes ready to take off. Some had recumbents, some had tandems. Many, many, people had super expensive carbon fiber and / or aluminum framed bikes. Probably even more people had shitty bikes, though. I felt like I was in the last category, but had fully tuned the Peugeot by taking off the restrictor plate to give the dragon a little more juice. It’s not exactly street legal, so I was keeping that on the DL.

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The San Marcos skatepark crusaders (Aaron the Kid, Brete Anderson, et. al.) are holding a fundraiser contest this Saturday at the legendary CFAN ditch. It should be a great day of skating out there with cool weather and cool people to session with. CFAN might be the last Central Texas skate spot that hasn’t been blown out in the current issues of The Skateboard Mag and Thrasher. Nice photo of Mancub frontside rocking an El Paso pool in the new Thrasher, btw. Awesome photo of Drehoble pivot-to-fakie on the tall Smithville quarter (compliments to The Skateboard Mag), too.
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