Professional skateboarder Ryan Lay reflects on the shifting nature of a life built around movement, from decades spent skating to thru-hiking, trail running, and eventually gravel cycling. What began as a search for something new became another way of moving through familiar places, crossing long distances, getting in over his head, and finding the kind of perspective that only comes from being somewhere you’ve never been before.
It occurred to me recently, I think when I get into some new thing what I’m really looking for is something that can break me open in a sort of shapeshifting way. To introduce myself a little, I’ve been a professional skateboarder for over a decade and during covid went from thru-hiker to trail runner to general mountain athlete and most recently, a guy who’s into gravel cycling. I remember in 2020 feeling the fatigue of chasing a lifelong dream of becoming a professional skateboarder, contracts dwindling up, facing what at the time felt like the twilight of my career.
At that point, I’d been skating nearly 25 years and was not exactly ascending any sort of proficiency curve. It’s just a normal thing that happens for long term athletes: youth fades, industries lose their luster, the commodification of it all starts to nag at you every time you go out to do the thing. I hiked the Arizona Trail in 2021 definitely searching for something, and ran the Grand Canyon R2R2R shortly after that. The grandness of traveling previously incomprehensible distances, the daily highs and lows, the solitude, I found to be really challenging and beautiful in ways I’d never really experienced from skating.
I spent the next few years almost exclusively exploring and building upon this newfound base and spending as much time as possible getting lost in the desert. I loved being a beginner in a new athletic pursuit. As life often surprises us, a new board sponsor and an opportunity to finally sign with a major shoe brand (New Balance) suddenly thrust me back into professional skating. I actually had a strange multi-month period where I felt like I had killed most of my fast twitch muscles (i.e. skate legs) and needed to retrain them specifically for skating. New opportunities meant I had to reconsider how I used my limited energy, especially going into my mid-thirties, and that’s really where gravel biking came into the picture.
I quickly set out on some failed bikepacking adventures, struggled through mechanical issues and special gear (which I admit I still kind of hate), but eventually came to really love the pace of life on a bike. I had always biked for transportation and recreationally but this new world of adventure cycling, similar to thru-hiking, opened up the places I lived in entirely new ways. And ultimately, it really helped me continue this path of ultra-endurance/internal discovery that I was still fascinated with *and* allow me to recover quickly.
Shortly thereafter, with much hubris, I took part in a sort of unsanctioned gravel ultra called Ride Across Arizona, traversing the state West to East roughly 700 miles on some of the state’s most scenic backcountry roads. I had no clips and I remember hike-a-biking so much of the time, way out of my depth, but just was astonished at the distances and biomes we were able to cross, especially in a state as diverse as Arizona. There were these arteries I’d never known existed connecting all these beautiful mining towns, and unlike being on foot, you could just move across them with relative ease.
I have distinct memories on this trip of finding myself under the stars in the vastness of the Arizona high desert, 50 miles from a place called Seligman at maybe 10 pm, my newfound friend Evan throwing up, settling in for a long night of washboard gravel roads. The horizon was like a razor out there. It’s a memory I come back to often. There’s a lot of trite things to say about perseverance, being tested, etc. etc. but truly, excluding the relationships and community we build, those are the defining moments of life. You want something to just break you open, give you space to simply be in awe of the world and what your body’s capable of, to take a deep breath and feel the hugeness of it all.
