Skating Across America

I think I’ve come upon a cool idea. Along this trip, I hope to meet a bunch of different skaters from across the country, so I’ve decided that I’ll do a series of Skater Profiles. Not only will this site showcase some of the beautiful places across this country where I can skate, but it’ll introduce people who are out there and doing just that. These profiles will be more in-depth than most of the other posts on the blog, and so will punctuate this site with some more in-depth profiles.

As such, I present to you my first Skater Profile, in my hometown of San Francisco: Dom Sagolla.

Dom is a 21st century Renaissance man. He is most well-known for his work in the technology industry. He was one of the core group of creators that helped to come up with Twitter, and if you haven’t heard of Twitter by now, then I should probably teach you about things like the iPhone, television, and electricity. He is writing a book called 140 Characters about Twitter that has gotten him pretty significant press coverage. (Google him for proof if you want.) He works for Adobe in R&D, and also develops iPhone apps for his company DollarApp, in addition to running a major conference for other iPhone app developers called iPhone Dev Camp. The list goes on and on, but maybe my favorite part of his resume is the fact that he was one of the 10 guys who made the Obama iPhone app for the last election.

But beyond technology, he’s a husband and a father, a musician, a writer (as The Book reveals), and a longtime surfer and skateboarder. We met through Twitter, and have surfed together in the past and have now also skated in a spot that we’ve dubbed the Technical Garage. On an empty Sunday afternoon, believe me that skating The Technical Garage felt like I was robbing a bank at a secret spot. No traffic to worry about, with about a runs down a 7 story garage. Pretty epic.

We both brought cameras and I’ve put my footage together in the following video. With such long runs, I wanted to soak up the beauty of a 7-story ride, and so these clips are wonderfully lengthy. I couldn’t help myself and ended up playing around with color and stop-motion a bit…what can I say, I’m a film geek.

I’m stoked that on the eve of our departure (we leave in 2 days!) I was able to share a truly memorable skate session right in my own city with Dom. It’s exactly the send-off, and the start to summer vacation, that I was looking for.

To see more photos of our skate session, click here to be taken to Flickr.