2020
San Diego to San Francisco. 630 miles by bike, with no training and no experience.
My name is Jason Vanporppal. I'm 27, and I grew up in a town called Paramount, California.
I started skating when I was nine and got addicted to it. I dropped out of high school, and there was a stretch where I came close to having nowhere to live.
Where I grew up there were a lot of ways for a kid to lose his way, and plenty of people around me who did. Skateboarding is what kept me from taking any of them. It gave me somewhere to be, something to get better at every day, and a reason to keep showing up.
In 2015 I started a YouTube channel and fell in love with making things.
Then in 2024 I skated across America: 2,977 miles from Venice Beach to New York City in seventy-six days. It raised $25,000 for skateboards for underprivileged kids, and it gained a following I never expected.
In 2025 I skated across Japan alone — eighteen hundred miles in fifty days, from the northernmost point of Hokkaido down to Okinawa — and raised $10,000 more.
Then Africa. One hundred and six days, six thousand kilometres from Uganda to Cape Town, and more than $50,000 raised toward a skatepark in Uganda.
Now I represent anyone with a dream — that anything is possible, and that you should never let anyone tell you your dream is too big or too crazy.