I got this from Jeff Gaites (NYC) and thought I'd post it here. We've got a lot of time left to rip downhills. These guys make us look like kids.

By CLINT WILLIAMS
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

Published on: 05/12/06

You hear them before you see them. A soft sort of rumble just loud enough to rise above the crickets, the buzz of street lights, the white noise of suburbia after sunset. Sometimes you hear a series of sharp, shrill tweets before you see them.
And when you do see them — big guys on very big skateboards — you don't see them for long.

It's a glimpse of sapphire lights and reflective vests. In the time it takes to decipher the sighting, the night riders are gone.
"I thought they were kids when they first came by," said Danny Dickerson, who lives at the base of a steep hill. "Then I looked again and said, 'They're the same age as I am.' "
With an unusually long wheelbase of 3 feet, the boards are built for speed. The guys, not so much. The youngest in the group is 35. The two most breakneck boarders are both 41. They're all married; most have kids.
Two or three nights a week they grab their 44-inch skateboards, called longboards, and go ripping down hills at nearly 40 mph. In the dark.
"We're just a bunch of 30-somethings trying to break the monotony of suburbia," Greg Pangburn said. "It beats 18 holes of golf."
A little over a year ago, chiropractor Tripp Arnold went skateboard shopping for his young son. He ended up with a $200 Fibreflex Pintail for himself.
With that purchase, he stumbled to the cutting edge of skater dude culture.
"Longboarding is definitely on fire right now," said Carleton Curtis, managing editor of TransWorld SKATEboarding magazine. "It is its own thriving subculture."
Longboards "are not for tricking and flipping," said Arnold, 41, who grew up in south Cobb County tricking and flipping on the kind of skateboard most commonly seen gliding on rails, ramps and benches around town.
After he put together his board, Arnold recruited a couple of guys in his neighborhood — Mike Rosamilia, 41, who played football at Georgia Tech in the 1980s, and Ted Scott, 37, who rode rodeo bulls while at South Cobb High School. The three and Pangburn are the core of a loose group of seven or eight boarders who ride mostly in Arnold's neighborhood.

Echo Mill is a west Cobb County subdivision of more than 450 homes starting in the upper $200s, as real estate agents say. It has two swimming pools, two playgrounds, eight lighted tennis courts and a mile of creekside walking trail.
There isn't 100 feet of flat road in the whole place.

"You're never far from the next hill," Arnold said. The neighborhood, he said, "is the Breckenridge of Georgia," a reference to the famous Colorado ski resort.

The boarders have explored other areas from Vinings to Cartersville, but when it comes to the variety of runs, there's no place like home. The long, gentle slope of Haven Crest Road is perfect for cruising — like a beginner's run marked with a green circle at a ski resort. The steep, sudden, stomach-in-your-throat drop of Harbormist Drive — where gravity and guts net maximum velocity —is a black diamond expert run.
The posted speed limit in the subdivision is 20 mph. These guys never go the speed limit, even when controlling their decent with a series of wide, carving turns.

"It's a lot like snow skiing," Scott said, "except you just don't want to fall. And there are no cars on ski slopes."

The high school skater dudes in the neighborhood wear tight jeans and Vans sneakers, protected only by their adolescent sense of immortality. Arnold and his buddies take grown-up precautions, most suiting up in high-impact plastic armor that includes helmet, gloves, knee pads, elbow pads and, sometimes, gloves.

Even with the protective gear falls are bloody. Everyone can show you scars. Arnold recalled hitting a pothole one night "and it just snatched my board from underneath me." Sliding across the asphalt "took a few freckles off," said Arnold, who rode the rest of the night in a blood-soaked T-shirt. He later filled in that pothole, and others, with cement.

Potholes are just one hazard on a long list. "We've had dogs run out in front of us, raccoons run in front of us," Rosamilia said.
The most serious hazard, of course, is cars. The boarders say they ride after dark after the dinner dishes are done and the kids are in bed because it them an advantage in avoiding collisions. "At night," Arnold said, "we can see cars way before they see us."

Still, the riders take measures to be seen — and heard — by drivers.　"I've got a reflective vest," Pangburn said. "I've got a whistle. I'm Aunt Bea."　Some riders have bright lights mounted on their boards or helmets. Some carry flashlights. Nearly all carry a whistle to warn those downhill of the riders' approach.

The biggest threat of injury, however, may come from the riders' own adrenal glands. High-speed bombing down a long straight hill no longer provides enough of a rush.　"The most fun thing now is carving the cul-de-sacs," Rosamilia said. Speeding toward the bottom of a dead-end road demands acute focus.

"You can't really make a mistake," he said.
When riders make a mistake, they bail out — leaping off the board and sprinting until they can stop.

"If you're going more than 25 miles an hour," Arnold said, "it's hard to stay on your feet."
Then it's about finding a soft spot to tuck and roll. The boarders, happily, ride in a neighborhood of well-tended lawns.

"If you've got to ditch," said Scott, who ran into an empty trash bin his first night out, "landing in this Bermuda grass is like landing in a water bed."

Everyone has ditched. Everyone has crashed. But no one has been seriously injured.
If anyone does break a bone, they shouldn't expect much sympathy from Kristen Rosamila, Mike's wife.

"I told Mike, "If you get hurt, Tripp is taking you to the hospital," Kristen Rosamilia said. "Don't come crying to me."
Still, she said, there is no point in trying to stop the night rides. "They are not your standard, run-of-the-mill 40-year-old guys."

"These guys make us look like kids."

-not you mate
;-)

Flash, until I get a reflective vest and a whistle you can't make comments like that

but with my breeding program already begun you have a point