In the past year I’ve made what I assume will be lifelong friendships with people from all over the Midwest. Some of the tightest homies I’ve met are a part this goon squad from Indiana. I first encountered the core of the Tired GanG at the Mounds Down 2013 presented by Dubs longboards which was just a truly great event. We had arrived late Friday night, for this two day event, and stayed up even later with the Wisconsin homies, T-bone Stone Fest, and the legendary Eric “Thane” Bain and a group of Tree Trolls before finally having to pass out.
I was surprised to hear someone up before me as I am usually the earliest riser. No matter it seemed prime time to get up and start skating so I stumbled out of the tent safety gear in tow listening to the sound of Thane Bain’s voice trying to find where he was talking to someone. Finally I noticed a tent had been pitched behind ours sometime while we were asleep and there was this blonde Midwestern Christ-looking dude talking and stoking with the Bain-ster. I figured if he was talking with Eric then he’d probably be taking a few runs with me at some point and as is customary, I invited them to come have a seat and get the day started with a nice safety meeting so nobody was sketched about riding close.
Soon after letting Blonde Christ check out my safety gear I learned his name was Austin Cochran. He had come with his girlfriend, and buddies Harris, and Ian from Indianapolis and had hit the same traffic we did only later. They were asleep because they had gotten in at four in the morning but Austin was up and stoked. Practice runs started early and we were out with the groms hitting the pavement before 8am. Nobody wanted to pack run that early they just wanted to do some freeriding. Fine by me, skating is skating. Austin had snuck off to somewhere but I was having too much fun to know where anyone else was.