Why you should take up skateboarding
What I’ve learnt from a painful and pointless hobby
A few years ago, when I told my wife I was going out to buy a skateboard, she rolled her eyes. If you know her, you’ll know that this is not unusual. She said skateboarding is dangerous. I told her to stop being ridiculous. We ended that day in Accident and Emergency, with a cast cradling my broken elbow, and later, me ruining a dinner party by being far too loud and overly enthusiastic thanks to some industrial strength painkillers the doctors saw fit to provide me with.
My obsession with skateboarding started early. I walked out of a classroom aged 11 and saw a kid from the year below perform a perfectly weighted kick flip right in front of me. It was as if he did it just for me, like he knew just how enthralling and hypnotising I’d find it, just how much of a lasting impact it would have on me.
I started skateboarding that very instant, borrowing the kid’s board, which he kindly showed me how to balance on. I gave up skateboarding about 54 seconds later, after a career-defining fall, which would put me off the whole thing for about ten years.
Now, post A&E, and without the need to borrow a ten-year-old’s board, I skate as often as I can. Here’s why…
Skateboarding is… good looking
I sat tiredly for years in the MDF stalls of lecture theatres doing my best not to put too much effort into getting my History of Art degree. Elderly professors with dishevelled wispy white hair and poorly hidden hip flasks showed us the traditionalism of the Old Masters, the sheer weirdness of Mannerism, the bounding innovations of the Early Renaissance. Younger, hipper, lecturing PHD students with glasses without any lenses in them told us about the clarity of Conceptualism, the ambition of the Constructivists, and pomposity of Post-post Modernism. The fact is, for me, skateboarding is better, more attractive, more packed with profundity than all of it put together. No piece of art I’ve ever seen moves me as much as seeing Ishod Wair effortlessly navigate the street furniture of Philadelphia, or watching Austyn Gillette float through the concrete banality of LA.
I mean, take a look at Dylan Rieder’s backside flip below. Watch it loop a few times. Watch how perfectly the board lifts below him.Watch the practiced precision of the front foot flick. Watch how the board flips and meets his feet even before reaching maximum displacement at the top of its arc of travel. Watch the calm, centred, and controlled landing. Watch it… its… goddamn beautiful.
Skateboarding is… pointless
Spending hundreds of hours trying to get a 8"x 31" piece of wood to rotate 180 degrees while turning a full revolution on a vertical axis is… completely and utterly pointless in almost every practical sense. These are not useful life skills. Skateboarding is not like learning a language, or other transferrable skill. It won’t be a valuable addition to your CV. You do it for its own sake, and its own sake only. You sweat, and hurt yourself again and again for no other reason than that you want to be good at skateboarding.
A clean varial heelflip will be of no use to your career. It will not improve your relationship. It will not help you file your tax return. Except it absolutely will. It will do all of these things and more, because a varial heelflip you can be proud of requires things I don’t have, like dedication, and an unerring self motivation in the absence of a coach or a trainer. It requires you to set a goal and keep moving towards it even though it (really) hurts. Trying to reach the goal will make you look stupid. Kids will point and laugh when you fall for the 38th time in a row. Japanese tourists will literally document your failure on mid-range Nikon point-and-shoots. Wives will roll their eyes. It will feel like you will never even get close. And that’s all because…
Skateboarding is… all about failure
The Failure vs. Success ratio of skateboarding is woefully out of balance. A few weekends ago I was learning (an embarrassingly easy) trick. I tried it 342 times before landing a messy, ugly, awkward version of it. That’s a 0.29239766081871343% success rate.
The Effort vs Reward ratio is different. That single, lonely success in amongst a crowd of over 300 failures makes it all worth it. It puts a demented smile on your face, eclipses anything negative happening in your life, turns a bad day into the best you can remember. You’ll walk around high-fiving bewildered strangers. You’ll skip across the city handing out unwanted autographs. Wives will still roll their eyes, but you won’t even notice. You will feel… incredible.
It’s this singleness of purpose that attracts me. It keeps you going when you’re repeatedly slamming your hands into a bricked pavement, and when you’re embarrassed to have stumbled on a 4mm crack in the ground in front of a group of aloof teenagers. You keep at it knowing that somewhere in the next month of failure, will be a split second of elation that will fuel another 30 days of abject suffering. It’s a special kind of suffering - one that I hope everyone gets to feel at some point in their lives.
