Take a walk in Chris McBride’s shoes and you’ll notice the inch of heavy-duty tire tread Velcroed to the bottom of his black basketball sneakers. Except McBride’s shoes aren’t for walking; they’re for braking—à la Fred Flintstone—after hurtling down devilishly steep hills. The 39-year-old Bothell resident is a street luger. That means he lies down on a five-foot-long plank attached to skateboard wheels and lets gravity and asphalt have their way with him—at 60 miles per hour.

McBride, the number-one-ranked luger in America, and fourth fastest in the world, has been speeding down streets around the planet for the past 11 years. A little over a decade ago the contract programmer for Microsoft was crashed on his couch watching the X Games on TV when he caught a street luge competition. Inspired, he peeled himself from the sofa, bought a pair of motorcycle leathers, bought the makings for a home-concocted board at his local hardware store, and rolled right into his new world of high speed.
He’d also rolled into a world of pain. Remember the car chase scene from the movie Bullitt where Steve McQueen is blazing through San Francisco in his Shelby? McBride and his fellow lugers raced down the same street on their boards a few years back, only they added ramps that shot them skyward like cannonballs. At 60 miles per hour, McBride hit the ramp at the wrong angle and slammed into hay bales lining the street. “I caught my right arm, broke it, it swung me around, I hit my left leg and broke it,” he recalls, “and, somehow in there, my helmet got twisted up and broke my nose.” Every time he breaks a bone he vows to quit, but if three fractured arms, a nose, and a finger didn’t wreck his need for speed, we doubt anything will.