Chad Caruso has done what most people would consider a bad idea on a board with four wheels: he skated across the United States, coast to coast, in just 39 days.
Guinness World Records confirmed the feat this month after Caruso completed the more than 3,000-mile journey from Venice Beach, California, to Jacksonville, Florida, between May 1 and June 8. That works out to an eye-watering average of about 72 miles a day — roughly the length of a marathon-and-a-half, every day, on a piece of wood the size of a sandwich board.
The record is the second time Caruso has skated across America. His first crossing, in 2023, set the previous Guinness mark for fastest solo skate across the continent. This time he came back with experience, a polished route plan, and a clear goal: shave days off his own record.
The route
Caruso''s 2026 line crossed the Mojave, climbed the southern Rockies, hugged the long flat stretches of West Texas, and finished by threading the humid pine forests of north Florida. Most of the days were spent on quiet rural highways and bike paths, where a longboard can roll cleanly for hours at a time. He documented the trip in near-daily videos posted to his YouTube channel, where viewers could watch the country roll past in time-lapse — desert sunrises, gas-station meals, dog walks at dusk, the occasional flat tire on the support van.
To satisfy Guinness, Caruso kept obsessive records: a GPS watch and multiple tracking apps logged every mile, every speed, every break. Photos and timestamped clips backed up the data. A small support crew followed him in a van for food, sleep and safety, but every mile of forward motion had to come from his own legs.
What it takes
The math of skating 72 miles a day is brutal. Even at a comfortable cruising pace of 10–12 mph, that is 6 to 7 hours of pushing — one leg doing most of the work for hours on end. Endurance skaters routinely swap their pushing leg to spread the load, but blisters, shin splints, and the slow grinding of feet against grip tape are part of the daily uniform. Wind, heat and bad asphalt take care of the rest.
In interviews along the way, Caruso credited careful pacing, a calorie-dense diet, and what amounts to a meditative tolerance for repetition. "You stop thinking about the whole country," he said in one clip filmed somewhere in West Texas. "You just think about the next telephone pole."
Why people skate across countries
Cross-continental skates have a small but devoted lineage going back to the 1970s, when long-distance pioneers first proved that a skateboard could, in fact, double as a long-haul vehicle. The modern version is part endurance sport, part performance art, part fundraiser; Caruso has used past trips to support youth-skateboarding programmes and mental-health charities.
For Guinness, the record now belongs to him until somebody else picks up a board, points it east, and starts pushing. For Caruso, the record is almost beside the point.
"The board still works," he said at the finish line in Jacksonville, holding the same battered deck he''d started with in Venice Beach. "That''s the part I like."
