About Me

I should probably start with explaining a bit about myself and how I got my start in aggressive inline skating. My name is Patrick Chenoweth, I am 33 years old, and I grew up in Mason City, Iowa. Growing up, I had a few friends that got me into skateboarding. I was never very good, I could ollie and I think I landed a shove it once. When I was 13 I started working at Roller City Skating Rink where I spent a lot of time over the years roller skating. A few years later, probably '92 or '93, a group of us decided to order some inline skates from the pro shop at the rink. I ordered a pair of Riedell inline skates complete with metal frames and huge 80mm wheels. These skates were intended for recreational skating and definitely were not built to take the beating they soon did. We started jumping over spots on the skate floor, on and off benches, over each other and so on. Pretty soon we discovered the skate video Mad Beef with Arlo Eisenberg, Chris Edwards, B. Love Hardin, Brooke Howard Smith, Brandon Smith and a bunch of others pioneers of our sport and decided it would be fun to start trying some stuff we saw them doing. I bought some plastic grind plates and anti-rocker wheels to help with the grinding.

About this time we started video taping ourselves and we made our first video, "Skateboys" under the "company" name of Dum-S Productions. Most of us worked as skateboys handing out skates at the local skating rink, so the name seemed pretty fitting. The video is pretty much just us jumping small gaps, small sets of stairs, grinding parking blocks and bike racks. We even took the video into the local sports shop to sell it. I think we might have sold one copy. Unfortunately, I don't think there are any copies of that video that have survived the years. We made something like 6 or 7 videos over the years.

Soon after I got my first pair of real aggressive inline skates: Roces Majestic 12s. Since those I have skated original K2 Fattys, Rollerblade Spizers, USD Thrones, first gen Remedyz, and now Razors Bambricks (best skates I have owned).

Anyway, sometime around '97 or '98 some of the pros from Minneapolis (Steve Thomas, John Schmidt and a few others) came down with the Legacy bus to put on a skate competition. We partied with them that night and the next day they came to the skating rink when I was working (I quit that same day). That was probably the highlight of my skating years.

In '98 I moved to St. Paul to go to school for computer programming and I got a job at 4 Down Skatepark where Chris Farmer used to skate when he was just a punk kid. Ben Weis and the French brothers skated there all the time too. I worked there until it closed.

Since then, I got married and had two kids. I trained in martial arts and ran a school for a few years. Skating got put aside for about 5 years. Earlier this year I decided to start up again and now that I am skating, I realize how much I actually love the sport. Even though it has taken me nearly all summer to regain just a small part of the ability I had before, I am truly enjoying it more than I ever have. Maybe because now I skate for the fun of skating and not to video tape or impress anyone. Most of the time I skate at the local free skateparks. I rarely see any other inline skaters. Actually I think I only saw 4 or 5 all summer.

Well, in a nutshell, that is my story of skating. There are plenty more stories, which maybe I'll share sometime. I may even post some of our old skate videos if the other guys are OK with it. Mostly I just want to share my feelings on the sport for what they're worth.