Pro Skateboarder Lauren Perkins Has a Thrill for Danger

Growing up in the surf town of Huntington Beach, Calif., Lauren Perkins was anything but your typical 5-year-old. In fact, she was already developing her thrill for danger by taking her first spins on a motorcycle, as well embarking on her dad’s skateboard for the very first time.

“I was always a tomboy and doing crazy things like that,” Perkins recalls of her childhood.

Already quite fearless, Perkins received her very first skateboard on her ninth birthday. The gift from her parents was timely — a new skatepark was opening up in her neighborhood.

“I was honestly on that skateboard, all day, every day,” she remembers.

Hooking up with a neighbor down the street, Perkins and her companion started teaching each other tricks. “The more I skated, the easier it got,” she says of her early beginnings.

Perkins would quickly rise to become one of the top skateboarders in the world. By the age of 12, she had become so skilled that she captured first place at a Gravity Games contest — defeating 45 boys in the process.

“That was huge,” she says of the 2001 victory, which soon led to a deal with Volcom. “I didn’t think going into the contest, ‘Oh, I’m going to win this.’ It was more like, ‘Oh, I’m going to try my best, and if I do win it, then that’s awesome.’ It’s the one contest that I’ll always remember.”

At the time, Perkins had little choice but to take on her male counterparts.

Says Perkins: “I didn’t really think anything different of skating with girls and skating with guys, because there really weren’t any girls at the time, so I wanted to beat the boys.”

A year after her triumphant victory, the number of female skateboarders started to grow, so Perkins began competing against her fellow newcomers. She would take first place at the All Girls Skate Jam in her hometown, defeating some of the top female skateboarding pros in the world.

“It was still hard because there was still these new girls that I had never seen before,” she says of the switch in competition. “That was lot of pushing myself to learn new tricks.

Still just an eight grader at the time, Perkins managed to maintain her focus in school as the travel demands began to increase along with the growth of both her skills and sport.

“It was tough,” she says. “I had to choose for a lot of contests, what I was going to do and what I wasn’t going to do. But my mom, she’s awesome. Her main thing is, get your school work done, get good grades, and just keep your school and skating balanced.”

By the time she reached her sophomore year in high school, the travel demands had become too overwhelming, so Perkins had to move into an independent study program.

“It sounds a lot nicer than it really is,” Perkins, now a 17-year-old junior, says with a laugh. “It’s hard. I really have to stay on myself, because it’s not like there’s a teacher up there every day showing me what to do.”

In recent years, Perkins has continued to hold onto the claim as one of the greatest female skateboarders in the world, notching several top finishes in the World Championships and the X Games to name just a few.

She maintains that she owes a great deal of that success to her early days of skating with the boys.

“I think that got me to where I am now, because if I didn’t have that, it just wouldn’t be the same,” she says. “I wouldn’t be at the level that I am at.”

Even though she has always been attracted to the thrill of danger, Perkins admits that she’s human just like everyone else.

“There are times when I’m like, ‘Oh my God, I don’t really want to try that, I’m going to get hurt,’ ” she says. “It’s part of what you do, but there’s definitely fear. If I’m at a contest and there’s a gnarly rail or I’m street skating, I’ll go, ‘Oh, do I really want to get hurt doing this?’

“There’s totally that fear, but I think it’s part of the sport, you know what you’re getting yourself into when you start it, and I think that’s what really shows who’s the best out there, because they go for it.”

Knock on wood, Perkins has managed to escape relatively injury-free over her now more than eight years on the board. She has suffered two concussions and weakened her ankles to the point that they are injury prone, but she has yet to break a bone in her life. Her mother and manager, Trina, says that watching her daughter take danger into her own hands can be challenging at times.

“It is only difficult watching Lauren when she is attempting a trick that I see can be dangerous,” says Perkins’ mom, who travels around the world with her daughter. “Most of the time, I’m pretty calm watching her go down a handrail or flying over a gap. However, I do still get nervous before she starts her run in a contest.”

Being one of the greater skateboarders in the world has certainly provided Perkins with her fair share of perks. A few years ago, her team manager at Volcom landed her the role of a stunt double for the Warner Brothers film “Grind.” Her first acting part was not an easy experience she says.

“I get there and the girl has really blonde hair, so they had to put my hair in this really, really thick gel to get it back so it wouldn’t come out of the wig,” explains Perkins, who admits to having really thick hair. “It was a really cool experience, but it was tough.”

She has also appeared in a commercial and landed a speaking role in the Disney film “MVP 2: Most Vertical Primate.” She says she wouldn’t mind hitting the big screen more sometime in the future.

“I love it,” says Perkins, who was also the first female skateboarder to ever appear on the cover of SG Magazine. “I think it’s so much fun. Anytime I get the opportunity for those types of things, I just get so excited because it’s so different.”

These days, Perkins is hard at work, preparing for the 2006 circuit. Next week, she’ll depart for Australia for the Globe World Cup, one of her favorite events each year. She attempts to eat healthy, but “that doesn’t always happen,” she says. She also trains at least twice a week at the gym in order to keep her stamina up for events.

“Skating is unlike any other sport,” she says. “Regular sports, you can go to the gym and work out and that really, really improves your abilities. With skating, a lot of it actually has to do with skating. Being on the board. Getting on the board. And getting used to it.”

That is where her personal trainer, Scot Prohaska, comes in.

“He’s awesome,” she says of Prohaska. “He’s worked out with a lot of pro athletes over the years. I have a contest coming up, so I’m going to be training and learning new tricks for that. Right before a contest you are like, ‘Ok, I’m going to learn these tricks and have a fresh bag of tricks when I go.’ ”

Even when she doesn’t have a contest on the horizon, Perkins says that she attempts to skate every day.

“Yesterday my friend and I went up to L.A., parked my truck in a parking lot, and we skated around the city all day,” she says. “It was so much fun.

“Lately, I’ve been going street skating and skating at Volcom, because I have a key to their private skate park. Just skating a lot and trying to stay healthy.”

To better prepare for an event, Perkins says that she tries to follow her typical routine.

Say Perkins: “Not all skaters do this, but it’s something that I have found works best for me. Before an event, I kind of set goals for myself. I’ll be like, ‘Ok, I’m going to learn this trick,’ because you never know what the course is going to look like until you get there. So you kinda just skate parks and get the trick that you are working on down, so when you are on a different kind of ramp or something, you can try it on that and get that down also. Each trick you can say is different in a way, compared to how the ramp is built, like if it’s harder or easier.”

While the X Games remain the biggest event of the year, Perkins says that she looks forward to them with mixed emotions.

“It’s more, ‘Oh shoot, it’s the X Games, that’s crazy you know,’ ” she says. “I get excited for it because it’s a huge contest, but that’s probably the most nerve wracking contest, because if any of my friends want to come, they can be there.”

Her sport has come a long ways over the years, and Perkins is proud of the fact that she has been along for the ride.

“Skateboarding in general is growing bigger and bigger,” she says. “Women’s skateboarding getting into the X Games is huge. There are more girls, and every year the bar gets pushed up another level with the tricks and the stuff the girls are trying. It’s becoming quite the sport.”

Her hopes, she says, is that skateboarding finds its way into the Olympics sometime in the near future.

“That would be awesome,” says the 5-foot-5 skater. “I can’t see why skateboarding couldn’t be [in the Olympics.]”

When she’s not training or competing, Perkins is hard at work fulfilling obligations for her sponsors, which include etnies Girl and World Industries to name a few. Currently, she is hard at work on a team video that World Industries is developing.

“It really proves the type of skater you are with the photos and video parts that you get out,” she explains. “Contests are good, but it’s not up to you. To get really good footage for this is one of my main goals.”

Looking back on her beginnings, Perkins recalls how she felt when she first saw Elissa Steamer, one of the true pioneers of her sport. Today, Perkins (she was also influenced by Rodney Mullen & P.J. Ladd) is living in a surreal world as she often travels the world with her idol.

“I remember saying, ‘Oh my God, she’s amazing,’ ” Perkins says of Steamer. “She was who I looked up to. Now it’s so weird — I’m traveling the world with her and doing photo shoots and stuff. Sometimes when we’re sharing a room I’ll say, ‘This is actually really weird, I used to look up to you.’ We’re really good friends now. It’s really cool.”

Just as Steamer was a positive influence on her life, Perkins has hopes of doing the same for others.

Says Perkins: “Last year at the Australia contest, this girl came up to me and she says, ‘You’re my idol.’ I was just flattered. I think an image is awesome. Some people are like, ‘I don’t care, grungy, don’t really care,’ and they’re still hung over from the night before of partying. That’s just not my thing.

“When I was younger, I looked up to girls skateboarding and I think everyone needs a role model. I hope that the younger girls can look at me and be like, ‘She’s out at the skate park, skating all the time, always having a smile on her face.’ That’s what I wanted and what I hope to bring.

“My mom is awesome, and so is my dad, and I think that they have really kept me grounded. I just look at is as I’m blessed to have everything that I have. I’m living my dream right now.”

Living that dream includes riding her Yamaha YZ80 motorcycle, surfing, snowboarding and messing with the drums in her spare time.

While she has always lived dangerously for as long as she can remember, Perkins is also quick to realize that her dream could also end at any given moment.

“I just look at it as it can be taken away from me at any second with one injury,” she says. “With one crazy injury, I could not be able to skate any longer. I take it day-by-day and look at it as, every day that I can skate, I’m stoked to be skating. When I am going to stop is probably when I can’t skate.”