SHELLEY PLETSCH, 40

Works in adult social care and lives in Rye, Kent

I’ve travelled the world with my skateboard. I grew up in Olympia, Washington, on the west coast of the United States, which is where I got serious about skating at the age of 17. I moved to southern California at 19 and skated down there, and then went on to study in lots of places around the world.

Skating is the same wherever you go. I was in Holland for a while, the Czech Republic, the Philippines, Siberia, Australia, India. When I was skating, I didn’t have any problems meeting people. Although I didn’t speak the same language as some of the people I met, I still had an instant group of people who would spend time with me and show me around their town or city. The media often perpetuate the idea that only one kind of person is attracted to skateboarding, but there’s a lot more diversity than that and recently there has been a shift to recognise this.

I came to the UK to do a master’s degree, met a guy, and ended up staying. I live with our son, who is eight, just outside of Rye, East Sussex. There’s a village skate park here and a couple in Hastings, including an underground park that is good for skating when it’s raining. Taking a newborn to a skate park isn’t really possible, so for a few years I spent less time there, but now he’s older I can go there much more often with him. He has his own skateboard, and although he’s not as into it as I am, he understands that I love it.

I’m 40 now and I’m not as skilled as I was 15 years ago. You physically decline as you get older and your fear is a little bit greater because you don’t bounce off the ground so easily. Someone like Tony Hawk has been skating his whole life, but he’s never going to do another 900 (a 900-degree aerial spin). In March, I was looking at a 12-foot drop-in (where the skater enters the half-pipe by riding down from the top edge) that I used to be able to do without a second thought, and after doing it twice I hyper-extended my knee on the third go and potentially tore my posterior cruciate ligament; I’ve recently learnt the older you get, the less likely you are to fully recover, and therefore be put forward for surgery so it’s likely that I will have to live around this injury.

But I’d absolutely recommend it. Skating is not only good for your fitness, it’s good for your health and wellbeing too. It is used as an innovative treatment in Canada for young people suffering from trauma, because you’re outside, in the fresh air, being active and having to interact with different people, which builds all sorts of transferable skills and ticks a lot of boxes for improving health and well-being. It’s a different way of having fun, and I’m meeting more and more people who are picking it up for the first time.

g ‘Skating is good for your health and well-being,’ says Shelley Pletsch