He Started at 65. At 91, He's Still Teaching People to Skate.

Lloyd Kahn is 91 years old. He didn’t touch a skateboard until he was 65. In between, he built an entire career around something else entirely — he was the shelter editor of the Whole Earth Catalog, then founded Shelter Publications and spent decades writing and publishing books about hand-built homes from Bolinas, California — and then, in his mid-sixties, decided to try skating for the first time. This past August, a clip of him teaching a fitness influencer decades younger than him how to skate was picked up well outside skateboarding circles, the kind of story that reaches people who’ve never set foot in a skatepark.

If you’ve read Juanjo Urbizu’s story on this site — another skater who took it up for the first time at 70 — Kahn’s version adds something specific: he started five years younger, has now been at it for twenty-six years, and spent his working life as a publisher and editor rather than an athlete. He wasn’t a stranger to boards, though. Kahn has surfed since 1954, and he has written about how much longboarding feels like surfing. What he had zero of at 65 was skateboarding experience. If a sixty-something book publisher who had never stood on a skateboard can still be doing this at 91, “too old to start” stops being a believable excuse.

Starting at 65 isn’t the same project as starting at 15

The honest, useful part of Kahn’s story isn’t the viral clip. It’s what starting a balance sport in your sixties actually requires that starting as a teenager doesn’t.

A 15-year-old has fast reflexes, a body that heals in days, and effectively no fear of falling because falling rarely hurts for long. None of that was available to Kahn at 65. What he had instead was patience, a willingness to go slowly, and — by his own long-standing habit — a body kept in reasonable working order by decades of surfing, running and building before he ever stepped on a board.

His very first ride ended in a fall that hurt his wrist, and he drew the obvious conclusion. By his own account he now rides in a helmet, wrist guards and elbow pads every time, with knee pads some of the time. The gear didn’t make him invincible. He broke his wrist on the board at 80, and a few years later broke his arm — a compound fracture — badly enough that his doctor suggested it was time to stop. By his own account, he did go back once he’d healed, but on different terms: tentatively, on gentle slopes, without pushing hard. That is the late-starter’s deal in one sentence: you can’t skip the falls, so you plan for them, you let the recovery take as long as it takes, and you come back to easier terrain than you left. Our guide to falling safely after 40 covers the technique side of that plan.

That’s the actual takeaway for anyone reading this who’s 50 or 60 and wondering if they’ve missed the window: the window late starters use isn’t the teenage one. It’s a different one, built on managing risk deliberately instead of relying on a young body to absorb mistakes for free.

What he does differently because he started late

People who pick up skating for the first time well into adulthood tend to build different habits than people returning to something they already knew, and Kahn’s approach reflects that:

He treats cruising and longboarding as the actual sport, not a lesser version of one. Kahn, who lives in Bolinas on the Northern California coast, rides a longboard for the motion, the balance, and being outside — not for tricks, not for a trick ladder to climb. If your own return to skating has you drawn toward cruising and carving rather than stairs and rails, Kahn at 91 is a long-term example of exactly that version of the sport sustaining someone for decades.

He kept at it specifically because it stayed fun, not because he was chasing a result. There was no competitive ladder for him to climb starting at 65, no realistic path to any kind of ranking. What kept him on a board for more than twenty-five years was simpler than that: he liked it, and he kept doing things he liked.

He’s willing to be a beginner in public, repeatedly. Teaching a fitness influencer decades younger than him how to skate, on camera, at 91, is not something most people are comfortable doing even once. Neither is going back to the board at 80-something after a doctor has told you to stop. Kahn’s comfort with it tracks back to the same thing that got him on a board in the first place — a willingness to try something new without needing to look expert at it immediately.

The part that’s easy to miss

The hook is his age. The actually useful part is that a person with no skateboarding background, starting from literally nothing at 65, built a relationship with the sport that’s now outlasted most people’s entire athletic careers. That’s not luck, and it’s not rare genetics. It’s what happens when someone starts slowly, pads up, keeps their expectations realistic, and doesn’t quit in the first hard year — the same formula this site has suggested for every adult starting or restarting on a board, just stretched out further than most examples manage to prove.

You don’t need Kahn’s twenty-six years to get the point. You need the version of his first year: slow, patient, genuinely enjoying it rather than grading yourself against anyone else’s timeline. Everything after that is just more of the same, for as long as you want it.