Hello. My name is Mike Vallely. I'm a skateboarder. I've been skateboarding for 15 years and have been lucky enough to do it as a professional for the last 12. Although my professional career has had it's ups and downs, I wouldn't trade any of it. It's all brought me to where I am nowhere with you.

Not only am I a skater but I'm also a fan and follower of skateboarding and its history. Besides my family, it's the biggest and most important thing in my life. In fact, I can truly say that when I was fourteen years old the act, culture and lifestyle of skateboarding saved my life. I was a confused, depressed and angry teen living in a small town in New Jersey with no outlet for my angst. Somehow, someway, I stumbled upon skateboarding.

Skateboarding is not only the best thing that ever happened to me, it provided my life with meaning, purpose and direction. At that age (when I began) those are important things - it enabled me to make it through my high school days virtually unscathed, except for some road rash. I was able to avoid the pit falls and traps of adolescence that I saw so many of my friends and peers fall into by dedicating myself and all my free time to the promise of skateboarding. The promise? Fun.

Fun is the most common word attached to skateboarding and it is used consistently by riders all over the world to describe what they do and why they do it. Skateboarding is fun, it always has been and always will be. At the most basic level, that's why I've skated for the past fifteen years and why I will continue to for the rest of my life. But as fun as skating is there's so much more to it.

I've always believed that skateboarding is more than just a "fun" physical activity or recreational sport. I've always looked upon it as a sort of art form, a mental and physical discipline like the martial arts. It's a positive, productive and creative way to release aggression. It takes balance, concentration, discipline and dedication to learn and master just the basics of the sport. To actually progress at skating takes the above plus much more. I like to think that skateboarding is not just for everybody, yet anybody can do it. That's the real beauty of it, no one's excluded. You don't have to be good, athletic or sponsored to have fun. In skateboarding, the journey is the destination.

Pro skateboarding gets plenty of media attention and skaters all over the world watch in amazement as the pros progress and the sport continues to evolve, yet all over the world, every single day there are hundreds of thousands - even millions - of skaters out in the streets, on the ramps, and at the skate parks. They're doing it and the sport is truly there's. They're the real hardcore skaters of the world and they are my inspiration to continue on as a pro, to be visible, to participate. I care about them and the sport.

That's why I'm here.