Skating is skating

I love all kinds of skating. I’ve spent a good portion of my life chasing that flying feeling both on wheels and on the ice. Once I even found an abandoned skateboard in a ditch. I took it home and fooled around on it sometimes for a bit. I wasn’t even half bad at it, although I eventually started using it more to wheel around large houseplants than doing any actual skateboarding. You’d think I would have been a kid when that happened, but I think I was 27. (Maybe the houseplants anecdote gave that away.)

My true skating love has always been when both of my feet are independently working. Ice skates, inline skates, roller skates…they all have their distinctive charms due to physics, but the basic action is the same. Push, glide, push, glide. Bend, stretch, bend, stretch. Skating is skating.

Skiing and snowboarding also somehow deserve a mention here, skiing more than snowboarding I suppose. Skiing really is just skating with hilariously long blades on. Snowboarding though…yes we love the carving, and yes we love that feeling of fresh butter rippling out from underneath the board. Snowboarding is ALMOST skating, but not quite. It’s not skating because your feet are trapped in a nightmare foot-pillory scenario from which they cannot escape. That is strictly a personal opinion, although I guess now I am making some kind of a BRAND STATEMENT by saying so. Hot take: skateboarding is skating, yes, but snowboarding is not skating. 

“Skating is skating” might be something of a hot take itself, actually, which surprises me every time it comes up in conversations with fellow skaters. “It’s not the same,” people say. And, well, that’s true. It’s not THE same, but it is the SAME. If that makes any sense. Inline skating, at least the kind I do (freestyle slalom), uses more inner thigh muscles than the kind of ice skating I do (You don’t need to ask me how I know). Roller as a whole offers much more resistance than ice. When I switch from inline to ice, I have to constantly go all Cutting Edge on myself with the “Toe pick” reminder. When I go back to my slalom skates, I have to consciously think of that banana rockered frame and remember not to lean back too much so I don’t fall backwards and whack my dang head.

But the carve, the side to side, the bend stretch bend stretch meditation with your feet flying for you…that’s skating. That’s what it is. It’s not axels or heel wheeling or Ollies or whatever trick else. The special sauce is really just that combination of bending and stretching and using your body weight and what’s underneath your feet to catch your balance and glide on by. 

By that definition, I suppose snowboarding actually *is* skating, but I propose we just accept the irrational and move on from it. 

Joy in the Differences

There is also joy in switching back and forth. When I’ve been on ice for a long time (which I have, as I am currently in the midst of a five-year fitful bout of figure skating for which there seems to be no cure), then it is positively DELICIOUS to ride around on front wheels and back wheels. HILLS and obstacles are refreshing after the constraint of a flat white oval. I don’t always love having to GO somewhere to go skating. It’s nice to be able to just put skates on at the door and GO SKATING. The world is my playground; the world is my rink.

Similarly, there is nothing quite like the sound of a deep edge ripping into fresh ice. The sheer effortlessness of the glide…my god, compared to inline, you barely have to push. When you fall down, there is this lovely tendency to slide over a smooth cold surface instead of accumulating road rash in one’s knees or depositing flesh like a meat crayon.

I love the technical precision I get from ice skating. My figure skates are more reactive and less forgiving than any of my inline skates. (My inline figure skates may prove to be the exception here, but I haven’t used them enough to know.) They force minute muscle corrections in a way that my inline slalom skates just can’t quite. There is less friction between skater and surface, and less shock absorption, which translates to quicker feedback. (Important author’s note: ask any of my friends what I know about physics. They will tell you it is nothing.) Ice rewards slight corrections more than asphalt. But considering the technical advancements made in inline skating in the past fifteen years or so, that’s surely just my personal experience.

Inline skating (and rollerskating and skateboarding, of course, but these are not My Sports), on the other hand, has that skate-the-world possibility baked right in. Who wants to be limited to one big flat hall, refrigerated or otherwise? Not me. I want to cover the world and get bugs stuck in my lipgloss. I want to parkour with wheels on. I want to do a dance-y thing between cones on the ground. I want to play. 

Don’t Make Me Choose

If I had to pick one right now to do for the rest of my life and nothing else, I would have a very hard time choosing between inline skating and ice skating. Although, to tell the truth, if you held a gun to my head today I would pick ice. 

When I close my eyes and dream, I’m always skating through the world, not in a rink. Over hills, along highways, jumping over little obstacles here and there. Nothing too crazy (I’ve never been that much of a free rider), but navigating things like curbs and stairs. Enough to get around, enough to move through the urbanized human world.  

But the funny thing is, in those dreams I’m always wearing ice skates, even though of course that’s completely unrealistic. 

Dream logic, you know. 

Blades, wheels, trucks, toe picks, cones, rinks, skateparks…of course skating disciplines wildly differ from one another and require different techniques. But these are just the accoutrements of their respective mediums. Painters don’t cease to be painters when they move from watercolors to oils. They might suck at it, sure, but they’re still painters. Painters paint. Skaters skate. 

And skating is skating.