Well, finally someone from Silverfish got their hands (feet) on a Freebord. I met a guy named Adam who has been riding it for awhile --and prefers it to longboarding. He gave me a 30 second demo and it appeared pretty easy, and very fun to ride. I jumped on and the thing slid out from under my feet in about one second flat...

It is definitely a paradigm shift getting used to the Freebord. I spent about an hour practicing on a small hill. It helps a lot if you have at least a small decline to get some momentum.

I\'ve never snowboarded, so the concept of catching an edge was, foreign to me. If you\'re not familiar with the term, it means that while sliding sideways (with the board at a right angle to your fall line) your front 2 wheels (or the edge of your snowboard) catch on the pavement (snow) and you are effectively thrown forward onto your face (a faceplant). It wasn\'t too hard to prevent this, but I had to watch and be ready to bail.

After about 10 minutes it was fairly easy to carve normally. It\'s a strange feeling going over the middle wheels, but you don\'t really lose much control. If you just try to carve, without using the middle wheel for help, you won\'t get any turn radius whatsoever. From the look of the videos it seems like everyone lets the board slide some to make it carve nicely. I still haven\'t been able to do that.

I found that to do 180\'s you need to have a little speed and you just pull your back foot around as if you were sliding on a regular longboard. Instead of sliding, you just roll around. The board seems to stop itself once you are all the way around. For me it was easier to pull my back foot forwards, I still don\'t feel comfortable spinning backwards to do a 180.

So that\'s after an hour. I\'ll update the article when I make some more progress.