Winners's Circle -Jeremy Shweder

Doug Dupin gets a lot of strange looks on his way to work.

The 33-year-old Washinton, D.C., resident travels to and from his job at the Department of Agriculture on a specially built off-road skateboard. This is no ordinary skateboard. The oversized , 46-inch board has a built-in compass and has huge tires with thick tread made for going over rough surfaces.

"I'm billing skateboarding as a form of transportation," says Dupin, who builds and sells the $175 boards. "You can take it on the trains, you can take it on the buses."

Dupin made the skateboard his only form of transportation on a 1998 trip down the length of the C&O Canal. The 184.5-mile trip took nearly eight days to complete. "people were looking at me awestruck most of the time," he says.

He followed up that trip the next year with a 200-mile skateboard voyage between New York City and Providence, R.I., for the X-Games. Dupin uses both legs to propel himself on the skateboard, a rare talent that he was forced to develop for his long trips.

Dupin's project this year was a skateboarding trip in Denmark [in fact, Holland] with his wife. With all of his off-road experiences, he's been lucky to have no serious accidents. The worst danger that he's encountered so far has been dogs that chase and occasionally bite him. "A certain percentage of the dog population goes crazy when it sees skateboards," Dupin says. "Actually, the percentage for humans is about the same. About five percent of people just hate me."