I know the Rowley post is kinda old news but I found an old Jenkem interview from years back and he went into his story and reasoning for being vegetarian. Also mentions his first shoe material use was not because he was vegan, or one at all. You guys put your own projections on this guy and the posts from a few pages back are now pretty laughable in hindsight.
https://www.jenkemmag.com/home/2015/10/26/the-geoff-rowley-interview/
Is there anything you personally feel is overlooked or misunderstood about yourself?
Growing up being a vegetarian and what I do now with hunting is difficult for a lot of people to understand because they don’t know my full story. It’s self exploration – if you knew me well you, would know I was into reading books on wild animals and stalking deer when I was 15, 16, 17 years old. My best friend growing up worked for the forestry commission and he influenced my skating more than anybody. He started skating in 1972 and he was also vegetarian when he was younger. Today he shoots and kills lots of deer year round for game management practices in England. He’s a natural outdoorsman and introduced me to predator hunting and calling also.
I became a vegetarian when I was younger mostly for dietary reasons. I was exposed to a load of what now I can see as total propaganda written by somebody with a direct agenda, not based on science or research or anything like that. I stopped eating meat having seen that and I had no one else around to tell me any different. But I felt good and I was growing fine. I was healing from slams and things like that. I didn’t preach, that was my diet and I tried to stick to it.
I did that for many years, but later on, I started to not recover when I really should have been really strong. I was physically fit but I wasn’t recovering from slams. Minor sprains in my muscles, all of a sudden I would be skating for four hours a day and then I would come home and I couldn’t feel my legs for two weeks.
I had a really amazing chiropractor at the time that told me to get my diet analyzed. So I got a full background check, nutrition test, allergy test, all that stuff, and it all came back and I didn’t lack anything. Not one trace. Apparently I was fine, but I still was not feeling good. Something was going on, so I switched up my diet and started eating fish and two weeks later, all of a sudden, those muscle issues started to disappear.
This is me looking at things from both ends, I’m different now, my body at this stage as you grow older requires different things. I’m not going to have diet hold me back from skateboarding. So I started eating fish and it felt good. I recovered from all those muscle injuries and then started eating dairy a little bit again, which felt good as long as I didn’t eat too much of it. Eventually I slowly transitioned into eating a protein based red meat diet, and now I feel stronger, fitter, and healthier than ever. I can skate for longer periods of time now than I could ten years ago, and my muscles function and recover at a faster rate.
What about being vegan? I remember hearing you were vegan for a while?
I wasn’t ever vegan in the ‘real’ sense of the word. I had leather in my car, had leather boots. What really was tough was when vegan started getting labeled on shoes and stuff like that. My initial first shoe used synthetic fabrics because it was more consistent and durable than suede, the material always wore out evenly. That’s why I used that material, because it was better at that point, not because I was vegan.
I’ve been actively shooting photographs and filming people hunting and stuff like that for forever, but I never talked about that much because what’s that have to do with skateboarding? If someone is asking you in an interview about your skateboarding should I say, “actually I’m going to Colorado tomorrow to stay with elderly gentlemen and we’re gonna run dogs in the mountains?” It’s a beautiful thing to see animals that intelligent and that in touch with their environment that they’re able to pursue game with their senses and push themselves physically to the brink of exhaustion. They love it and it shows in their faces, dogs with a strong sense of smell were meant to trail game. I honestly believe you couldn’t run a marathon and get the same kind of exhaustion that you get when you run dogs through high elevations after big predators. You learn so much, it’s a crash course on the whole ecosystem, and I love that. Like skating straight to the deep end of a pool for the first time and then trying to figure out how to get out
That’s Rowley backpedaling though, he was vegan, he was into animal rights because of Ed and that was 100% the reason why he did Synth shoes… and that is what annoys me about him! If you read other interviews from around when his shoe dropped he was talking to it from an animal rights perspective (although he did acknowledge the car seat thing and not being able to avoid animal products in every single situation)
The recovery thing, I guess is what turned him back but as someone mentioned there is ways of doing it (probably harder to do 20 years ago though). Okay so it wasn’t about animal rights, and synth materials skated better huh? Then why didn’t he continue to drop synth models after reverting to eating meat? Idk, you either love him or hate him, I just don’t like the inconsistencies in his reasoning …
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But yes, the topic is a bit of dead horse (mountain lion?) at this point so I’m going to personally try to avoid engaging in it in the future
Topic: lame instagram posts by pros (Read 1459270 times)