Lloyd Kahn is standing on a skateboard at 91 years old, offering to teach a stranger how to ride. His doctor told him he was too old for this. His response, delivered without hesitation: ‘Fuck that.’ For anyone quietly wondering whether the body has an expiration date on adventure, Lloyd is a walking, paddling, mud-bathing counterargument. He did not start skating at 5 or 15 or even 45. He picked up a board at 65, fractured his arm in a crash bad enough to make him pass out, drove himself from San Francisco to the hospital, and was back on the board a few days later.
A house full of reasons to keep moving
Lloyd built his home in Bolinas in 1971 on half an acre of land he bought for $6,000, with a building permit that cost $200. The house itself is an argument against sitting still. A Versa Climber stands in one room, rope-and-broomstick stretching rigs hang nearby, an Indo board sits in the kitchen so he can work his balance while watching television, and small Post-it notes are positioned around the property to remind him to run, not walk, between the gate and the front door. He is training for the Dipsea race, the oldest cross-country race in America, a 7.4-mile charge over a mountain with hundreds of stair steps, rocky descents, roots, and ravines. He has run it at 91.
The Versa Climber gets a particular endorsement from Lloyd: ‘Within a minute, I can get my heart rate really pumping. I think it’s the quickest way to get your pulse up.’ But the bigger point is structural. He does not block off an hour for exercise and call it done. Movement is distributed through the entire day, woven into how the house works and how he moves through it.
His book ‘Shelter’ became a founding document of the DIY building movement, and his publishing company eventually put out ‘Stretching,’ which sold 3 million copies and funded half his income for 40 years. He sold the publishing company a couple of years ago. Now he runs an Instagram, a Substack, and still designs books by hand, pasting photos and columns of text with removable Scotch tape before sending them to his partner Rick for digital production. He drinks coffee, occasionally smokes a little weed, puts on rock and roll, and gets in a good mood before he starts laying out a page.
Real food, real skepticism, and a small glass of last night’s beer
Lloyd grows asparagus, keeps a greenhouse, and eats mostly from his garden supplemented by local eggs, meat, and fish. Breakfast is oat groats ground fresh just before cooking, simmered in half milk and half water. He takes eight or nine supplements in the morning and washes them down with kefir. When asked about the biohackers spending a million dollars a year on longevity protocols and genetic manipulation, he did not hedge: ‘I think it sucks. I think it’s just wrong.’
His position on alcohol is honest rather than pious. He used to drink half a bottle of red wine every night. Now he cuts back because he feels he has run out of liver capacity for it. He misses it. ‘The conviviality of drinking is fun at parties and relaxes you,’ he said. The small glass of beer sitting on the counter was from the night before.
The afternoon ended at the water, where Lloyd outpaced his companion on a racing paddle board without visible effort, then proposed a mud bath in the channel shallows. A small crab turned up in the mud. After they cleaned off, Lloyd said it quietly: ‘I’ll bet you’re the only person that will ever have done that with me.’
His partner Leslie died a couple of years ago, after nearly 50 years together in which they reportedly never had a single argument. He misses her. He does not grieve in the way that stops a person. He sees a flowering bush in the garden and that is her.
The skateboard he wishes he had found at age five
Asked what he would have started sooner if he could, Lloyd did not say publishing or building or running long races over mountains. He said skateboarding. Wished he had started at five instead of 65.
Lloyd Kahn bought his half-acre in Bolinas for $6,000, built the house himself, grew the garden himself, and is still out there on the board, in the mud, and on the mountain at 91, which is more or less the same answer he has always given to anyone who told him to slow down.
