Click on me, grab a drink, get comfortable, and read how this bad idea somehow made it back home
PRAGUE - BLACK SEA - PRAGUE
Prologue: eighty meters
The best stories do not begin with a heroic departure. They begin with embarrassment. Mine arrived eighty meters from home.
That morning, Honza came over - he could no longer join me on the ride himself, but more on that in the next chapter - so we could at least say a proper goodbye. We filmed a few shots, wished each other luck, and I rolled away. Finally. After half a year of preparation, after solving the trailer, after sealing hundreds of connectors, I had imagined the very first step a little differently.
About eighty meters from my apartment building there is a short metal post stuck in the ground, maybe twenty centimeters high. It had always been there and had never been a problem. But I was not yet used to the fact that a board with a fully loaded trailer does not turn as willingly as it normally does. The board and trailer together weighed around 55 kilograms. I clipped the post with the front truck - at low speed, but with that much weight behind me, it was enough. The truck bent.
I called Honza, who had not left yet: “Honza, I think I might need new truck. The front one is slightly bent.” Luckily, he had spare trucks at home, exactly the same as mine, because he had made an identical board for the trip we were originally supposed to do together. We replaced the bent hanger, and I also installed a new set of Riptide bushings, which I was trying for the very first time in my life. In hindsight, testing something new right before a record ride was probably not the brightest idea, but fine. I finally set off about two hours later than planned.
The funniest part is that I had not even managed to start the GPS recording yet. In all the chaos of packing, I had completely forgotten. So according to every official record, my ride to the Black Sea did not begin by stumbling into a post outside my home. It began two hours later, with a new truck and a slightly damaged trust in my own turning radius. Maybe that is how it was supposed to be.
1. How it all started
It was not my idea - and that is probably the first thing everyone should know before getting into the rest of the story.
I have always seen myself more as a sprinter than a marathon rider. I enjoyed finding out how far I could ride in a single day, not how many days in a row I could stand on a board. Multi-day trips were never really my thing.
The idea for this ride did not originally come from me. It came from people in the Czech esk8 community. Over a few months, seven different people wrote to me independently and asked whether I could try to do a proper long-distance record — something that would actually show what electric skateboards are capable of.
At that time, long-distance esk8 was getting some attention in Czechia, but the existing Czech “record” did not feel like a real benchmark to many people. It may have sounded impressive from the outside, but inside the community we knew the bar could be pushed much further.
That was the part that started the whole idea. It was more about the feeling that if someone was going to put a long-distance esk8 record out there, then it should be something truly difficult, something that would test the rider, the board, the preparation and the whole setup.
After the seventh person asked, I finally started thinking that maybe they were right.
At the time, the official Guinness-listed record was just over 1,440 kilometers. The Czech record was around 2,400 km. Unofficially, the bar was much higher. The story that fascinated me most was Jack Smith, who crossed America on an electric skateboard at the age of sixty-two, covering around 3,800 kilometers. It was actually his third crossing - the first two were on a regular push skateboard, and only the third was electric. He never submitted it anywhere officially. He just did it, then donated the board to a museum. That became the real benchmark in my head.
So around Christmas I told myself that if I was ever going to try this, it would have to be this year. In the coming years I already have other plans in mind that have nothing to do with esk8. I arranged a month off work and started planning.
The original plan had two riders. My girlfriend suggested that I ask Honza Bohac, the only person I could imagine surviving 250 kilometers a day. Honza said yes, made the exact same board as mine for the trip, and we spent months planning together. Then, two weeks before departure, he broke his arm - on an esk8, of course - and suddenly I was planning a solo expedition.
During the six months before departure, I took the board apart down to the last screw probably three times. Every screw was cleaned, degreased, and secured against coming loose. Every connector inside and outside was sealed with black adhesive Kafuter, which we started calling Venom - for good reason, because if you got it on your hand, you had a black paw for three days. The circuit boards were sprayed with moisture protection, the wheel bearings and gear drive bearings were taken apart and packed with water-repellent grease. The goal was simple: the board had to be able to swim. As it turned out a few weeks later, that was not just a fantasy.
On top of all that, in April I had surgery to remove my thyroid gland. It had nothing to do with the ride, but it stole a month of the training I had planned. In the end, I started without any targeted physical preparation - only with few years of riding experience, and the hope that my body would remember what it was supposed to do.
But one question bothered me more than any technical detail: how to carry all my gear without putting anything on my back. Anyone who has ridden long distances knows that even a few kilograms in a backpack feel heavier and heavier after the first hundred kilometers. At first I considered mounting racks directly onto the board, similar to the cargo mounts used on bicycle forks. But then the trailer idea started living rent-free in my head. I had seen people on Facebook attach normal two-wheel trailers to skateboards, but those had one major weakness - speed. In all the videos I found, nobody seemed to be dealing with a single-wheel trailer behind an electric skateboard.
So I spent two or three months arguing about physics with several AI models. I made them argue with each other until we worked through what forces would act on such a system and how it would behave in turns or if it started wobbling. I eventually concluded that a single wheel attached directly to the board axle should not be able to wobble on its own, because any attempt at oscillation would push directly into the board itself, and the board flexes and stabilizes. Theoretically perfect. Practically, I still did not trust the idea enough to spend more then 200 dollars on a ready-made trailer.
Then I realized that this exact principle - an axle mount with a joint that can move up and down as well as side to side - already exists on every scooter. I found one second-hand for 10 dollars, cut off the handlebars and the deck, bolted a fake axle onto the skateboard deck where the trucks normally sit, and attached it. In place of the scooter deck, I mounted a metal box for gear.
When I tested it empty for the first time, I could not believe it. It rode almost exactly like it did without the trailer, even at more than 50 kph, and nothing weird happened. Loaded with a tent, sleeping bag, tools and spare parts, it was different, of course. I had to tighten the trucks a lot, the board turned less than I was used to, and my usual cruising speed of around 50 kph dropped somewhere to 40-44. But it worked. And I would still take a slightly slower board with a trailer over ten kilos on my back after the 150th kilometer any day.
The board itself - a Flux Motion AT2 NOVA - did exactly what I expected from it. Before the ride, the manufacturer offered me parts and support. I refused, because I had genuinely prepared everything myself. I only gave them feedback that they should start making softer grip tape. I wanted this ride to be completely mine - my decisions, my bolts, my responsibility if something went wrong.
2. Prague to Vienna: a wet start
After the truck repair, I finally set off for real - for the second time that day, this time with the recordings running. It was raining. The roads were wet, and within the first few kilometers I realized that a loaded trailer, around 22 kilograms with everything inside, changes absolutely everything: stability, consumption, and how the board responds to input. Getting out of Prague was basically an escape room on wheels. Cobblestones and narrow streets with a trailer are not exactly relaxing.
Once the route reached quieter bike paths, everything immediately felt better. The navigation also did a surprisingly good job from the beginning of keeping me on paved surfaces, which meant a lot for the safety of the whole ride.
The first casualties appeared on day one as well. Part of the rear fender broke off before the second charging stop. I quickly got used to the idea that fenders on this trip would die one by one, and that this was simply the price of the pace. At least the charging stop in Ceske Budejovice had a very human touch: the station attendant brought me a chair so I did not have to sit on the ground next to the board, and the local bike paths genuinely surprised me with how smooth they were and how well they were hidden away from the main traffic. In the evening I reached a campsite near Cesky Krumlov, pitched the tent, plugged the board into power, and assessed the damage for the first time.
The second day was all about headwind. The route through Austria towards Vienna is otherwise beautiful, but the wind increased consumption, lowered my speed, and turned the trailer behind me into a very noticeable drag.
I reached Vienna late, at 22:52, after 330km that day, exhausted, with my back hurting and with the very clear realization that this was a completely different discipline from the single-day rides I was used to. I left the board and trailer safely at the exhibition grounds, where a friend works, and went to sleep in a hotel.
On the third day I did not ride anywhere. After two days I was exhausted, I felt sick, and the forecast for Vienna was even worse. It was an unpleasant but important moment right at the beginning: you cannot win a record ride by ignoring your body and the sky on day one. I used the break for service, small repairs, repacking the gear, and most importantly for resetting the pace in my head. It ended up being the only rest day of the entire trip.
3. Tailwind and a ticking time bomb on the trailer wheel
On the fourth day I finally got the wind I had been waiting for - behind me, not against me. Through Bratislava and along the Danube, I could suddenly ride at a pace that did not feel like a fight for every meter. There was a public holiday in Austria, so getting breakfast in the morning was not as straightforward as expected, but after the first charger in Bratislava, coffee and food fixed the situation.
But this otherwise pleasant day brought the first serious warning. I noticed that the trailer tire was wearing down unbelievably fast. After less than six hundred kilometers it looked like, at that rate, it might last only 800 to 1,000 kilometers. For a route originally planned to be over five thousand kilometers long, that was obviously not enough.
So I spent the rest of the day half riding and half thinking about where to find a replacement tire in Budapest.
Budapest eventually became one of the points on which the whole trip depended. The original tire already had a hole and was holding pressure only by some miracle. Luckily, I managed to find a replacement scooter wheel - a completely ordinary part that, in that moment, became absolutely critical. After Budapest, the broken Hungarian main roads continued, full of potholes and ruts, and the route to Balastya Beach campsite ended with several kilometers of sand, where I had to walk next to the board and push it through.
It was not exactly a romantic day, but it was essential. If I had not managed to find that tire, the following days would have looked very different.
4. Romania, first contact: a ford, a bearing and the mountains above the Danube
On day six I crossed into Romania and, at the same time, into a different time zone without noticing immediately. I only realized it when I suddenly found myself one hour shorter on time for my accommodation reservation. In that rush, I ran into the moment that best explains why I had spent half a year playing with bolts and glue: the navigation sent me onto a few kilometers of unpaved road, and that road ended at a ford across a stream full of large stones.
I had two options - disconnect the trailer and carry everything across separately, or just ride through it. I chose the second, stupider option. In the middle of the water, the board stopped on the stones. I had to jump off quickly, give it throttle, and drag it out while the water reached all the way up to the deck itself. That was the first moment when I truly found out whether those six months of sealing connectors with black Venom had been worth it. They had. The electronics survived the ford without a single hesitation.
The mechanics, however, did not get away completely untouched. The next morning I heard a strange sound, which I first blamed on the half-broken fenders and the wobbly little front light from AliExpress. After a while, in a bad mood, I ripped both off and threw them into the trailer - only to discover that the knocking continued. Only then did I check the wheels and find that one bearing had seized after the water and had managed to grind a hole directly into the wheel rim.
I repaired it on the spot as well as I could: removed the bearing, cleaned the hole, added Loctite, took out the spacer so the bearings could be tightened closer together, and flipped the whole wheel so the forces would load the less damaged side. It was not a forever repair, but it was enough to keep going. More importantly, I realized that the biggest threat on this trip would not be the batteries or motors, but small mechanical parts exposed to water, dust and vibration.
The rest of the day was one I will remember for the landscape, not for the problems. The Romanian mountains above the Danube, the serpentine roads and the valleys were among the most beautiful sections of the entire trip - right next to main roads where trucks passed far too close for comfort. Romania is a paradoxical country: when a road exists, it is often surprisingly good, but there is often only one road. So if you need to get from point A to point B and there is only one way, you know it will be the main route whether you like it or not.
5. Romanian roads: dogs, spectators and a burnt-out fridge
The next days were mostly about endurance. The Romanian plains can be so long that the navigation casually announces 90 kilometers straight ahead, which sounds easy until you try it on a skateboard - the same foot position, the same pressure, very little stimulation. Charging in this part of the trip became an art of improvisation: sometimes it was a free socket next to food vending machines at a car wash, sometimes a random outlet in a parking lot, sometimes a service socket outside a car repair shop.
Romania taught me two lessons I had not thought much about before: dogs and spectators. Village dogs there do not guard yards from the inside. They wait right by the gates, on the road, and the moment they see you, they run after you. Luckily their top speed, which I unintentionally measured, is somewhere around 35 kph - so escaping was always possible, even if not always dignified.
Worse were the people in cars. In a country where nobody has any idea what you are riding, many drivers decided they wanted to watch me for as long as possible - meaning they would drive behind me as slowly as they could until they had taken a photo or video. The problem is that I was standing on the edge of the road, where the surface is usually at its worst, waiting for them to finally overtake. For the first few hundred kilometers, it was kind of funny. After a few hundred more, I wanted to grab the nearest road sign and throw it through somebody’s windshield.
Sometimes I stopped not because I was tired, but because I needed to calm down. That feeling followed me for easily fifteen hundred kilometers of Romanian roads. Once, the police stopped me too, curious what kind of vehicle it was and whether it had a registration plate. I showed them the green registration document I had prepared for the trip. They accepted it immediately and wished me a safe journey.
One of the nicest stories of the whole trip happened while charging. I stopped for the night at a guesthouse where the owner offered me power from an extension cord outside under a pergola. After a while, everything suddenly switched off. The owner went to reset the breaker, turned it back on, and after half a minute it tripped again. We tried once more - nothing. Only the next morning did I find out: he had a fridge on the same circuit, and my charger had apparently killed it perfectly on command. Fridge completely dead, unplugged, emptied.
I expected him to add it to the bill somehow, but the owner was absolutely fine. He chatted with me all evening, and in the morning, for accommodation, dinner and breakfast - which would normally have cost more than 100 dolars - he told me to give him 100 Romanian lei, a little over 15 dolars. I do not know if he ever connected the burnt-out fridge with me, but I felt terribly guilty about it. At the same time, it became one of those moments that make me remember Romania fondly, despite all the roads and dogs.
The ninth morning started in Giurgiu and continued along the border between Romania and Bulgaria, where I charged in two countries in one day. But the main complication of the day was a ferry. I got on the wrong one, which took me in the wrong direction, and I only understood that once I was already on the other side. It cost me several hours and finally buried the plan of reaching Constanta and the sea that day. Then the rain came as well. I decided to stop in Ostrov, frustrated because the sea was suddenly so close. Only later did I learn that a serious storm hit the Constanta area that evening - so the delay that annoyed me at the time probably saved me from something worse.
6. The Black Sea
On the tenth day I left at 6:14 in the morning with one clear goal. But the ride to the sea was not as ceremonial as a person might imagine. The wind joined in, the roads were not great, and the sea kept hiding behind hills - always just “one more, maybe two more.” In your head you have this huge symbolic point, but your body is still only dealing with battery percentage, road surface and traffic.
After charging in Constanta, I finally reached the water. The moment was strange precisely because it felt so unceremonious. In my own recording I said only a few words: “So I have seen the sea. One o’clock, day ten. It is done.” And that was it. No grand speech. Just quiet relief and the knowledge that this was not the end, but the turning point. I took a selfie on the beach and almost immediately headed back, because the road home was just as long as the road there.
Shortly after leaving the sea, the rain came. With the fenders already long retired, water started spraying from below directly onto me. At my planned stop in Trei Stejari, none of the chargers worked, so I ended the day earlier than I wanted at local accommodation. I had reached the sea - but in reality, that was only the beginning of the second, harder half of the challenge.
7. The way back is not free
The return is mentally a different discipline from the ride out. On the way to the sea, you are chasing one distant point. On the way back, you know the farthest point is already behind you, but the same enormous distance is still ahead - only now without the symbolic summit pulling you forward.
Day eleven confirmed it immediately. At the next ferry, I arrived exactly as a four-hour break in service was starting, so waiting made no sense. I had to detour over a bridge and onto bigger roads - more traffic, more consumption, more stress, and some sections officially prohibited for bicycles, mopeds and pedestrians, so I had to be very careful choosing where I was actually allowed to ride. Among other places, I charged from service sockets outside a BMW workshop in Braila. When rain started closing in, I decided to end the day early at a hotel in Tecuci.
Day twelve was one of the shortest by distance, under one hundred kilometers, but one of the hardest by conditions. In the morning, I saw a large storm approaching on the radar and tried to outrun it. I failed. Heavy rain, cold and wind quickly turned me into a soaked, frozen wreck, and when it no longer made sense to continue, I hid at a bus stop. I spent about four hours there inside my sleeping bag, mostly trying not to freeze my feet. At one point I even put my legs into my sweatshirt because I could not warm them up any other way.
The radar promised that it would not stop anytime soon, so eventually I got up and rode on in the rain, because waiting would have meant waiting for far too long. I reached the accommodation in Soveja frozen, wet and filthy, worrying about how many more bearings had rusted that day.
8. Transylvania: bears, fog and one decision
On day thirteen I had a major mountain stage through Transylvania ahead of me, and from the morning it was clear that it would be different from the previous days. It was cold, there was a headwind, the roads were wet after rain - and the protective lens on my camera cracked, so unfortunately the footage from one of the most beautiful days of the trip exists only in part.
This time I put bear spray in my pocket. I had tested it once beforehand just to know how it worked. It is a very strong pepper spray, reaches about five to ten meters, and is one of the most unpleasant things I have ever smelled. Even more unpleasant was the fact that an hour later I forgot to wash my hands before going to pee. For a few seconds I felt like I was burning from the inside. That is something you remember.
Throughout the Carpathians, I held the remote in one hand and kept the spray ready in the other. In the end I saw three bears, and none of them was aggressive. The first one sat calmly by the road and did not even looked at me as if I was the one who had no business being there. The second I only saw briefly behind the guardrail as it ran away as soon as it heard me. The third was sitting on the edge of the road, and the moment it heard the sound of the gear drive, it turned and ran like its life depended on it - apparently the sound of the motor frightened it more than anything else. I do not know how fast a bear can run, but I have heard it can be around 50 kph, so I am very glad it stayed as distant observation.
The landscape more than made up for the tension. Serpentines, fog, valley views and mountain passes were among the strongest experiences of the entire trip. I also met motorcyclists there who, unlike what I am used to back home, almost all greeted me as if I was one of them. It was a nice gesture, and it planted the idea that one day I should come back here - this time on a motorcycle.
But somewhere around this part of the ride, roughly six hundred kilometers before the end, I realized that I was no longer enjoying it. Not physically - mentally. I realized that a record and a vacation are two different things, and they should not be mixed. If I treated the rest of the route as a relaxed holiday with fifty kilometers a day, I could increase the number, sure, but I would not be able to defend it to myself as a performance. A record has to hurt, like a marathon. You do not enjoy it during the race. You enjoy it at the finish.
And there was another reason, maybe an even more important one. If I continued according to the original plan through Poland all the way to the Baltic Sea, I would still be on the road during my girlfriend’s birthday - the same girlfriend who had been waiting for me at home and supporting me through the whole thing and not a little! After the Carpathians, I stopped caring about the beauty of the planned route and started looking for the fastest way home. I simply set the navigation to “fastest” and started finding charging points on the go, without long planning ahead.
9. Hungary, round two: a tank proving ground and a painful foot
The way back led again through Cluj-Napoca and Oradea into Hungary, and this part wore me down more than anything before it - not because of drama, but because of simple accumulated damage. Hungarian main roads are unique in their own way: broken enough that in some places I could not even maintain 10 kph, and you start wondering whether it would be faster to step off the board and walk beside it.
After one such day, when I crossed almost the whole of Hungary in one go, the back foot I stand on while riding really started hurting for the first time on the trip. Until then, I believed that four years of riding had given me legs ready for anything. They had not. The pain arrived after roughly 3,700 kilometers, and from that moment the body stopped recovering properly between days, even when I later rode on much better roads in Slovakia and Austria.
The next day i named my own little “Tour de Lidl” - I charged successively at three Lidl locations in Eger, Gyongyos and Vac, and after weeks of improvisation it was pure joy: the right connector, no question marks, it just worked. But in the morning I was once again dealing with a soft trailer wheel, I changed another tire, and I discovered that another wheel on the board already had a bearing hole ground out of shape. It was not an immediate end, but it was clear that after returning home I would need new wheel rims.
The electronics, batteries and drivetrain held flawlessly from beginning to end. In the end, the most tested part of the whole setup was the most ordinary one: wheels and bearings.
10. The final days: a squealing wheel and the finish
On the penultimate day I knew that only two stages remained - a strange feeling, because the finish was suddenly imaginable, but after more than two weeks my body was badly worn down. The route along the Danube on EuroVelo 6 was beautiful, even though it came with headwind, which on an open embankment with no shelter has a huge effect on consumption and trailer stability. After Bratislava, where I charged at the same station as on the way out, I returned to Austria and in the evening left the board at the Vienna exhibition grounds again.
The final day, the eighteenth, started in Vienna and was supposed to be more than three hundred kilometers long. Austria rewarded me with some of the best roads of the entire trip - small paved roads between villages, almost no traffic, and in Langau an exceptionally pleasant public charger for cyclists and cars, with a place to rest. After crossing back into the Czech Republic, with charging at McDonald’s in Dolni Pena and later in Tabor, the final serious technical problem arrived literally a few dozen kilometers from the finish: another wheel had the bearing hole ground out so badly that the bearing had slid inward and the wheel started wobbling side to side. It began squealing and whistling in a way that, after so many kilometers, does not sound like anything good.
So I rode the last tens of kilometers with my ears tuned to every sound, trying not to load that wheel unnecessarily and watching familiar things begin to appear around me - Czech roads, suburban buses, bike paths around Prague. The camera batteries were dying, my body was beyond tired, but the finish was finally in sight. I arrived home at 20:00.
Eighteen days. 4,107 kilometers according to GPS. An average speed of 35.3 kph. One ford, three bears, one rest day, and only one real failure on the entire trip that I had to repair on the road - although my wheels will remember everything they went through for a long time.
Epilogue: what it gave me
A few days after returning, when I talked about it out loud for the first time, someone asked me a seemingly simple question: what did the ride actually give me? I thought about it again and again during the trip, and the closest truth is probably this: the same feeling a person has at the finish line of a marathon. You do not enjoy the process itself - it hurts, and it has to hurt, otherwise it would not be a performance, just a trip. What you enjoy is the knowledge that you carried it through to the end and that not just anyone can do that.
I do not want this to sound arrogant, but I know I fulfilled what people asked me to do at the beginning: to show what an electric skateboard - and a human being standing on it - is truly capable of. And that is exactly why I honestly like the idea that one day someone will beat it. I have already heard about guys from America working on something similar. Whether it is by five hundred meters or two thousand kilometers, I will look at it with respect, because I know what such an attempt costs.
If someone asked me what I would recommend to anyone who wants to try something similar, I would sum it up in one word: respect.
Respect the machine, because even the best-prepared setup can still fail. Respect your own body, because it will hurt, and you will still have to keep going. And most importantly, respect the people around you when they give you advice — especially when they understand a specific part of the problem better than you do.
This ride was never just the result of my own ideas. I discussed every crazy trailer-mounting concept with a friend. I worked through the trailer mechanics with my grandfather. Another friend warned me in time that the sealing on my connectors was wrong and needed to be redone. And there were many more people who helped in smaller ways along the way. If I had ignored even one of those pieces of advice just because of my own ego, this ride might have looked completely different.
This was only the story as it happened. I am currently working on a video from the whole ride as well, and I will post it once it is ready, but it will still take a lot of time to put together properly.
If even a part of this story showed what it really takes to do something like this, I hope the next story posted here will be written by someone who goes even farther.
The finish itself was strangely quiet. No podium, no finish gate, no big speech. Just me, the board, the trailer, and the feeling that after 18 days of rain, wind, broken parts, charging stops, dogs, bears, ferries, bad roads and good people, I had finally made it back home and said to myself the only thing that came to mind:
“It is done.”
Hopefully I covered everything that could possibly be interesting. If I missed something, or if your brain is now generating even more questions, let me know. 
I had to split it into two posts because I exceeded the maximum character limit. 
