Mariah Duran always keeps one eye on the road while behind the wheel. She’ll be able to observe details like railings, stairs, and benches that the rest of us would overlook. Not only do those features of the environment stand out to her, but they also represent potential takeoff and landing sites for her flights. Sometimes the best way forward isn’t the one you can see, but the one you can make, she says.
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M. Duran Olympic Games
The young woman, now 24, relaxes outside in beautiful Los Angeles, where she and her two brothers spend their time actively participating in the local skate scene. They get together every day to discuss how they might get more “on the board.”
what is their goal? For Mariah to join the first-ever group of American female skateboarders to compete at the Olympics. It’s a big aim for anyone, but in April when we discussed it, Mariah sat back in her chair with the kind of chill confidence you’d expect from a skateboarder.
Perhaps she had recently received her second dosage of the COVID vaccine and was taking a short break from sleeping off the effects. Maybe it’s because she knows that failure is part of the game and that what matters is how she bounces back from setbacks, whether they be physical or mental.
Of course, the only way to improve your skateboarding skills is to fall. Mariah first went to the skatepark with her brother when she was around nine or ten years old. “I simply kind of did everything he did,” she admitted.
Skating was different from the other sports she had attempted because you can learn on your own without a mentor or instructor. What you have instead is a group of people to learn from and the opportunity to make mistakes on your own. “If we wanted to learn something, we would just go to the skate parks and attempt to figure it out,” she explained. If it doesn’t work, find someone who can. That means you played the role of your own coach. Mariah imitated her older brother by picking up new abilities and inquiries in the same ways he had.
It was a challenging process, and at times it was really aggravating. “It’s a love/hate relationship,” she remarked. “I know how much it means to you, but it’s not easy.” Skateboarding was something Mariah had to figure out on her own, despite the help she had from her brothers and friends.
For months, she practised her kickflip on the sidewalk in front of her house, jumping and flipping the board under her feet until she finally landed her first one. Feelings of annoyance began to arise in her. If it was so simple for her boys, why was it so challenging for her? I landed on [the board] and flipped back and that was the closest I’d ever been,” she recalled. She sprinted into the house and alerted the first occupant she encountered.
After that point, things started to get simpler. She remarked, “It’s [crazy] because after all those hours of trying to learn that one trick, it clicks after that.”
She made the choice to focus on skating. Soon after she finished high school, she began to triumph in a variety of minor, regional contests. Soon after, she attended the 2015 X-Games as a substitute, and she began receiving modest sponsorship. She came in second place in 2016.
Mariah’s parents eventually came around to supporting her unconventional music profession as she became more and more popular. Without the major backing of sponsors, Mariah required money for travel, which meant sleeping on friends’ sofas in Los Angeles, joining the skating community there, and skating outdoors; going to Austin for the 2016 X-Games; and finally, skating in Minneapolis in 2017. Mariah got a job waiting tables while the Durans hosted pancake breakfasts at Applebee’s.
She wished they could muster enough resources to accompany her at each competition.
That, she emphasised, is the nature of her own family. To which he replies, “It’s always been a family affair kind of stuff,” to which she chuckles. Both of Mariah’s brothers skate, but because the men’s pool is so much more cutthroat than the women’s, everyone in the family is more excited about Mariah’s success. Her parents and brother couldn’t afford to go to Chicago to watch her skate, so they drove there overnight once to show their support.
Last Words
At the 2018 X-Games in Minneapolis, that all changed. In the year prior, Mariah had placed 10th in the same competition. Something new occurred to her; she put her faith in herself. She finally said, “I sort of let go of the objective of winning.”
A former me would say things like, “I was always so hard on myself.” There was success with the plan. She completed a kickflip and all but one of her tricks in her second of three runs. She left the competition area to see her result, which was an impressive 87.66 and put her comfortably in first position.
