Pumping has always been far more experiential than academic to me. After watching and riding with people who’ve got it down, you attempt, adjust, flail, stop and think, then try again, with small increments of personal discovery along the way. Watch slalom vids and check out different forms. Wiggle for speed, and surf for cruising and style. As you’re learning, you’ve got to throw any reservations about public embarrassment right out the window. Be the clown on the trail, give everyone a laugh and a show. It’s a good time and it just gets better.
Personally I find a wide spectrum of ways to pump, and its important to tap into different styles depending on whether you’re tackling inclines, flats, or pumping a mellow downhill. Just like a distance runner, you can’t sprint the whole thing. Shake it up and experiment. And if you’re progressing along and run into some specific incremental block, drop a line on the forum, to compare notes and see if that temporary hurdle is a common one. Every day on the board is an amazing discovery, and riding with different people, you will always learn a little or sometimes even a LOT that you can work into your own game.
-james
LDP Setup Tips – Odiwan from Australia shares the stoke, helping summarize the salient points of setting up an LDP board.
James Peters commute – a glimpse of the daily ride home, using a minimalist pump for about 1.5 hours.
Eric Lowell pumping UP hill – Eric on the GBomb Dark Matter deck, working his way uphill without a push!
CODE PINK – Here’s a great contribution from Vlad Popov that’s been out there for years. He skates through the motions in universal mime-speak. Note that Vlad was just a quarter second behind Michael Dong in the Cyber Slalom challenge, the guy’s a phenomenal athlete.
CodePink PUMP from Longboy on Vimeo.
Eric Lowell again, shreddin the flats
LDP down the Monon trail – Jeff Vyain and friends on my earliest LBL Walkabout prototype. I sold it to Jeff and he gave it a TON of love.
Just Pumpin – Combines two of my favorite things: pumping along the trails and cranking some funk / jazz.
LDP and offset Cyber – Cyber slalom is by regulation a 6-foot center, straight line course. This video is a mix of some of that, plus random LDP clips out on the trail – and a little Xmas pumping through the house when the family was out.
Physics of Pumping – The academic version.
pavedwave.org 