No Snow? No Problem! SpikeBoarding Is Kind of Almost Sort of Like Skiing

What do you do if you want to ski every day but can’t get to the snowy mountains year-round?

For new Denver resident Dan Bowen, the answer is SpikeBoarding.

“Skiing is just gliding across the Earth’s surface using your arms and legs,” Bowen says. “For me, SpikeBoarding is just the simplest form of cross-country skiing and the most accessible form of cross-country skiing.”

SpikeBoarding is done on a board similar to a large skateboard, with plastic molding on both ends over the wheels. SpikeBoarders kick one leg to generate momentum and, with their opposite arm, use a pole to help push and balance themselves, switching often between legs.

Enrique Cubillo, who was born in Spain but moved to St. Louis as a baby, invented the sport in 2010 and has worked since then to spread what he sees as the new form of skiing.

“SpikeBoarding is really interesting because it’s brand-new biomechanics, but it’s also very similar to ancient Andor skiing, which is some of the oldest skiing that was ever documented,” Bowen says. In that type of skiing, people had one long ski for gliding and one short ski for pushing.

After touring much of the country last year on a quest to find the best place to ski in some capacity every day, Bowen’s top three cities were Denver, St. Louis and San Diego – and the Mile High City won out.

“I don’t want to practice one type of skiing; I want to practice and become as good as I possibly can at every single type of skiing,” he says.

Bowen, now 43, arrived at this place in his life after growing up alpine skiing and then discovering other ways to move about the world using the power of his own body along the way.

He plays hockey and rock-climbs, which – surprisingly – is what led him to his dedication to daily skiing. While researching how to become better at climbing, he read Training for the New Alpinism, by Scott Johnston and Steve House, taking from it the lesson that cross-country skiing, ski mountaineering and alpine touring can make you better at rock climbing.

“I learned of transport sports,” he says. “But not all of them are designed to help with my climbing and my hockey, and that’s what led me on the journey to find the simplest, most casual and effective form of skiing.”

However, doing that in Queens, where he lived at the time, proved tricky. He started with roller skiing, in which small boards with a wheel on each end are attached to the feet. Poles similar to ski poles are used, but they are altered to push against asphalt and are attached to the hands. Finally, he could ski without snow.

“I realized roller skiing is not casual, and it’s super-challenging, and I wouldn’t dream of commuting with it through New York City,” Bowen says.

Then he heard about SpikeBoarding. To learn how to SpikeBoard, people often start out on scooters, practicing kicking with both feet rather than just one and alternating between the two, a hallmark of SpikeBoarding that’s called “switch-kicking.”

Bowen says the process was quick to learn, and soon he could switch-kick across New York City much more casually than he could roller ski, because he didn’t have to be strapped in or have poles attached to his hands. Now that he’s in Denver, he can scooter, SpikeBoard, roller ski, and engage in all types of snow skiing to achieve his 365-days-a-year skiing goal.

To those who would say skiing requires snow, Bowen would point to Olympic skiing medalist Jessie Diggins, who cites roller skiing as a regular part of her training regime for cross-country skiing.

“She’s on roller skis, practicing this wonderful sport called skiing,” Bowen says. “Second, I would point to the history of skiing.”

Bowen has immersed himself in ski history through the books of John Allen, particularly The Culture and Sport of Skiing: From Antiquity to World War ll. He says that learning about how skiing has had many forms over its lifespan, including times when people used one ski and when people skied for transportation rather than recreation, helped convince him that the definition of skiing is broader than we think.

“It became clear that in the old days, meaning the B.C. to A.D. period – really old days – and through the Middle Ages and so on, people who skied used to choose their skis according to terrain and what they were doing,” says Allen, who is professor emeritus of history at Plymouth State University in New Hampshire.

There were short skis that were used to ski in the woods, and longer skis for traveling from village to village. Over the years, skis from certain valleys, such as telemark skis, became known as the best skis for different types of skiing, according to Allen.

Skiing went from a way to perform tasks to a form of recreation in Europe and the United States during the nineteenth century, spurred by the Industrial Revolution, which produced a larger middle class than had ever existed.

“That middle class found itself, at the end of the nineteenth century, becoming a little bit worried about their quality of life and their health,” Allen explains. “Particularly that occurred among this middle-class, educated group that began to feel that somehow there was too much money around to do too many silly things, and we should get out into God’s great world into the winter snow.”

There was a push for people (mostly college-aged men) to improve their lives through time spent outdoors, even in the winter. At the same time, Allen says, people in that group began promoting the idea of healthy minds being inside healthy bodies.

“It was the old Renaissance ideal, which the Victorians made into almost a cult, and it combined with Darwinism,” Allen says. “You had a new form of outdoor activity which would produce good bodies with good minds in them.” From there, he explains, the theory was that if the men were improved by the outdoor activities – it was a male sport at the time, though women did ski – then by proximity, the women and children would also be healthier.

As skiing evolved, the divergence between cross-country skiing and alpine reached its tipping point around 1924. According to Allen, that’s when rules and regulations for alpine skiing and ski races emerged.

“It’s really from that moment on that you get a divergence of the types of ski, because you race in a different way using different skis,” he says.

Skiing has continued to evolve over the years into what it is today: something most of us do at resorts, using chairlifts. But as Bowen and other participants see it, the next chapter in the history of skiing is SpikeBoarding.

SpikeBoarders like Bowen hope for more investment in the sport, particularly in Denver, where they say the conditions are great. Bowen encourages those who already enjoy skiing, skating, scootering or even biking and also want to get around using their bodies rather than engines to check out SpikeBoarding.

“I hope they will begin an education like I did seven years ago – the education that I plan on continuing for the rest of my life – of just learning as much as you can about the different characteristics of all these transport sports and figuring out which ones sound the most fun to them,” Bowen says.

Bowen claims that it’s not too hard to pick up SpikeBoarding: Just grab a scooter and practice alternating your legs. From there, graduating to a SpikeBoard is a piece of cake, he says. It could even help people who want to get into cross-country or alpine skiing nail the mechanics before hitting the mountain.

One mountain near Denver helped draw Bowen to the city: Lookout Mountain in Golden, which is dear to many athletes, including the downhill longboarding community. Bowen can see the potential for a SpikeBoarding community to grow there.

Bowen is looking to buy a home in the Sloan’s Lake area, though he’s still testing out all of Denver’s neighborhoods and renting in the meantime. He says from Sloan’s Lake, he can make it to Lookout Mountain using one of the many transport sports in his arsenal.

If that doesn’t sell you on SpikeBoarding, he says that despite living in New York City his entire adult life, he only felt like it was his true home after he began getting around by SpikeBoarding or other transport sports.

“It was an eye-opening experience for me, and I just couldn’t get enough of it,” he shares. “Today, wherever I am in the world, I leave the house and I choose between cycling, in-line skating, switch-kicking one of my scooters, roller skiing and SpikeBoard skiing, which I do the majority of the time because of how fun and casual and safe I feel.”

Skiing around a city helps him learn the ins and outs of each area, he explains, letting him spot landmarks and places to try that he wouldn’t become acquainted with otherwise.

“In my case, that’s how I became a true New Yorker,” Bowen says. “I absolutely cannot wait to become a true Denver resident.”