Yeah!
Man, I don't even know where to start.
He's all hyped up because I just got home.
There used to be this girl, Nina.
And she originally, like, had a zine.
This girl, actually.
They stopped doing it though, and then I,
I'm good friends with Nina,
and I called Nina one day.
And I was just like, "I want to start doing something again.
Like, girls BMX needs something like this."
So we started Yeah Zine, which is this.
I don't even know how long I made these for,
maybe, like, a few years.
It was cool, though.
I would reach out to companies,
and we would do like, little ads and stuff,
and that would help pay for the zine.
And then...
Leo's going to grab another toy.
Leo, can you just, not, right now?
Oh, look at this photo. This photo is sick.
This one is Issue Seven from March 2013.
This, this was how I lived.
Because it was, I got to, I got people to pay for ads
and that, like, paid for the zine to be printed.
And then I sold them for, I think I started at five.
And then when I went to the thicker paper
it was like seven dollars a zine.
There wasn't many girls when I first started riding though,
so the first contest that I entered,
it was actually against guys.
There wasn't really like any contests for girls
until, I would say maybe like,
after five years of riding.
The only way I would see,
like other girls riding was YouTube.
And Natalia was actually one of the girls
that, like I found on YouTube,
of her being a little kid, a little dork on a bike.
And now she's beating me in contests.
Like some of my best friends,
I've met through freaking social media.
California is definitely unique in a sense that like,
it has so much to offer
in every different aspect of riding.
Like growing up in New York,
I couldn't ride everything in one day.
I couldn't go ride park, street and dirt like I do here,
especially during the winter.
It was like indoor park only.
And then during the summer being so young, you know,
you'd have to drive through those places to go ride street,
and I've traveled a decent amount, and so I mean,
just from being like in the scene for a while
and just seeing, like, what's out there,
I definitely knew that like California
was the dream to get to, because it just,
because of everything that there is out here.
I moved here because I wanted to be close to the skate park,
and I can literally ride my bike to the skate park.
It's only a few blocks away.
All the contests for us are all in park,
because that's where most girls ride.
Eventually, there's probably going to be a street contest.
But, yeah, I think a typical day would be
make some coffee, get up, maybe go to the beach
for a little bit and then later on,
just go downtown and go street riding.
The cool thing about cruising around downtown,
you know, you can just kind of get lost and find
a cool rooftop or whatever to just go look at the city
and then get to the bottom and there's a spot.
It's just, you get kicked out
in like, literally like five minutes.
Like when I first moved to California,
I originally like was stoked on all the parks here.
But then learning about all the street and everything else,
it's just, like, an extra bonus.
It's super nice because I can
just throw my bike on and cruise anywhere
to the city and super easy, super easy to find parking.
There's some dirt jumps
about an hour and 15 minutes north of here,
and I grew up riding dirt,
so dirt holds a special place in my heart.
I feel like dirt
is definitely like an art form in just how they're built.
And so many people are great at building them
and they're like these beautiful sculptures.
For dirt, it's kind of like people
build the flow of how it's going to go,
and you can sometimes change it up and split off
like different lines or different transfers.
And then for street, it's kind of like
you have to find something to work with,
and normally it's like, if for hips
or anything to jump, it's kind of like one jump
instead of a flowy line.
I definitely feel like L.A. has more
of like that New York hustle vibe.
So it's, and you can definitely feel that
riding through the streets in downtown L.A.
Street is so unique, it's like, so much different
than park and dirt.
It's just like you kind of have to go out
and find your own thing and go ride it
and like figure out something to do on,
like a piece of art or a ditch.
I know growing up,
I definitely didn't get to ride ditches in New York.
There's so many.
And it's like each ditch has something to offer
different from, like one up the road.
You can find anything from, like,
little hubbas to little gaps to hips.
Sometimes people even have like DIY stuff in there,
where there's like, little rails and stuff.
Growing up, I lived in a small town,
and so moving to a big city was definitely,
a lot of doors opened,
and just between the people to ride with
and stuff to ride out here and the architecture
and being able to ride different street spots
and the ditches has just been so broadening to my career.