Skateboard Update
Skateboard Update
I have been skateboarding for 45 days, doing it nearly every day for about half an hour (following tennis practice). I now own three boards. I can say that I’ve got the hang of it. The cruising and steering part isn’t that difficult, but the push-off part takes some work. You have to learn to balance on your leading foot and not distribute your weight over both feet (I use my right foot to lead and my left to push). This is scary at first. You also need to lean slightly forward so as not to thrust the board forward underneath you, causing you to fall backwards. The skill comes gradually. The leading foot must be right in the center of the board or it will veer to the left or right, because the steering mechanism results from the tilt of the board as your feet press down. You push with your trailing foot close to the board in order to generate good power. Once you have this skill down the activity becomes quite enjoyable—I look forward to going every day. People smile and say hello to me (Latin people). I like the floating feeling. I like the feel of the board beneath my feet. I recommend it for older people. As I approach my 75th birthday, I’m glad I became a skateboarder.
I was playing tennis with Eddy the other day and I noticed something strange: I was moving faster around the court (I have never been slow). I was puzzled: why the increase in foot speed? Then I realized: it’s the skateboarding! Obviously, you need to develop leg strength (and balance) in order to skateboard, and this had carried over to my tennis movement. Thanks to the miracle of transfer of training, skateboarding had improved my tennis—not something I ever expected. The athletic world is a Unity (“sport monism”). In addition to this, I experienced a phenomenological shift in my arms: for the first time I felt that my left arm was acting as the main hitting arm on my two-handed backhand, not just playing a supporting role to my right arm. I have been working on this systematically over the last year and it happened quite abruptly: the left arm came into its own, accepted responsibility, took the reins. As I have described before, my knife throwing played a large role in this sinistral ascendancy, and now it had finally broken though. So, knife throwing (among other things) had helped my tennis stroke—another example of transfer of training. You have to smile. The CNS is an amazing thing. Who would have thought that skateboarding and knife throwing would be such a help to tennis playing? Has all this also helped with philosophy? I’m morally certain it has, though I have no direct evidence.
How do you think that increased athletic skills can help with philosophy? It’s understandable that being in better physical health can improve one’s thinking abilities, but improving a particular athletic skill doesn’t seem the same thing as improving one’s physical health. Is it that improving a particular athletic skill increases one’s self-confidence, which increases one’s willingness to think philosophically outside the box?
That’s why I said “morally certain”, i.e., it would be nice and good if it were true. I suppose the brain stays healthier because of better blood flow, but I can see no specific connection. There doesn’t even seem like much of a correlation, sadly.
I suppose in my particular case the two might be connected–it certainly feels like that. But this may just be because I do both to a high degree, the one counterbalancing the other.