2015.05.16 Breathing Is Important

Practice practice practice.
That's how the mantra goes, and it helps when what you're practicing is fun and rewarding. Of extra help today was having to slow down to compensate for the slippery conditions, to focus on my balance. As I bounded over yumps and my tires slid around banked corners, it occurred to me how similar much of the action is to skiing moguls.

This is fertile ground for comparison for reasons both spiritual and pragmatic. Skiing was my father's favourite way to taste freedom, and to share it with us. And mountain biking is my lower-cost higher-opportunity alternative to skiing. But for all my love of skiing, I was never a great skier. A pretty good skier, and enthusiastic within my own bounds of ability. And one of the things that I did not actually get good at until later in life was moguls.

Ok, that's not entirely true. I got pretty good at moguls when I was 14, but those were skier moguls. Since the advent of snowboards, moguls massively changed in aspect: choppy and lacking 'flow'. So mastering choppy moguls with my old-school racing skis was an effort. An effort that made several of my toenails fall out before I got the hang of it. But it essentially all came down to breathing.

The thing about breathing is how it ends up having full-core ramifications, which is why it is so key to many martial arts. So too it requires much core body effort to truly soak up repeated jarring hits. If you try to just do it with your legs (and arms) you aren't bringing all your strength to bear. And if you don't time your breathing right, the force of the blows can knock the breath from you and leave you gasping.

The laughing as I enjoyed my ride made this realization hard to capitalize on.