Wednesday, February 24, 2010

Speed Wobble

There's a parable here, or at least I hope there will be a parable here by the time I'm done, so bear with me.
I've fallen in love with longboarding. As it was with poker it's the meditative, zen quality of longboarding that really does it for me. The moves required to maintain any sort of fluid and experience enhancing flow are extraordinarily simple, yet any variation from the norm and you are eating shit in a manner most painful and quick.
Speed wobble is a phenomenon that occurs in most wheeled vehicles when they hit higher speeds. It is just what it sounds like. A terrifying incongruency between the oscillation of the wheels, resulting in a destabilizing wobble, also known as 'death wobbles' at very high speeds.
This is what I find absolutely beautiful and zen and jedi about speed wobbles on a longboard. When you're flying down a hill and the board begins to shake, the first instinct you have is to somehow correct your balance to fight the wobble. Generally this is a bad idea, and the parable should become evident here pretty quick.
Like the universe, a longboard's natural state is one of balance. The design of the trucks (the things that the wheels are on) is such that they are self correcting. If you apply force to turn them in one direction, the simple removal of that force will return them to center. If, while experiencing speed wobble, you attempt to steer your way out of it, you're keeping your wheels from correcting themselves. The best action to take, is nearly impossible to explain until you experience it. The best action to take, is to just relax. When it begins to feel that the board is going to lose all contact with the road and throw you down at 40 or 50 kms per hour, your best course of action is just to go loose and have faith that everything is going to be okay. The moment you do this, your calm translates immediately to the board and the wobbles cease. I used to get speed wobbles at around 15 miles per hour, then 20...now I'm up to about 40 without a problem.
As with so many things in life; fear, stress, anger, frustration, anxiety, they all seem to vanish into a smooth state-of-grace kind of calmness when you realize that trying to control it all is sometimes 90% of the problem. And in case you missed it, that was the parable.

1 comment:

Lauretta said...

So true! Beautiful analogy very well told. Smiles to you Andy.