Zaturdays: What Are We So Afraid Of?
Posted
on
on Saturday, September 05, 2015
by Paul
A small handful of people exist who were born with a medical condition causing them the total inability to feel pain. It’s called Congenital Insensitivity to Pain, or CIP. According to Wikipedia “despite sounding beneficial, [CIP] is actually an extremely dangerous condition.” While children, those cursed with CIP do the following things: stab their eyes with sharp objects, run headfirst into walls, tear out their hair, etc. On a show I watched about a girl with CIP she had to have all of her teeth pulled so she’d just gum her tongue instead of chewing it off. CIP sufferers behave as if they’re indestructible without actually being indestructible, so in the end they get totally tore up. Tragic stuff. 
Is Jaws’ ability to do things like this actually the result of a rare and often debilitating medical condition? Photo: Matt Price @priceyhot
BUT think about what CIP could do for a person’s ability to ride a skateboard! Try anything without feeling it? Maybe Jaws has it. I wonder. Sack a rail, smash your head on a parking block, get heel bruises all day long, no problem. The fear of suffering through high doses of pain has to be one of the greatest obstacles standing between us and our fully realized skate self. On more than one occasion I’ve found myself saying, “Yeah I probably could grind a 15 stair handrail…. but would I? No, no I would not.” Too scared. As the saying goes: If you want to dance all night you have to pay the fiddler in the morning. This is Nyjah after dancing all night.
The Heath Kirchart’s, Jamie Thomas’s, and Nyjah Huston’s of the world have done a great job of showing us what the human body can achieve when the human’s brain has their body risking great amounts of pain in the pursuit of stunts. If we didn’t feel pain, could we do the things that turned each of them into skateboarding’s golden gods? Maybe. But probably not. Because it’s not just the fear of pain that keeps most of us from hucking the 20 stair. That’s part of it sure, but what about the fear of being severely injured / incapacitated? * I’m way more afraid of tearing an ACL and being forced off my board for six to nine months than I am of how bad the injury will actually hurt. A solid shinner can hurt worse than a broken leg and bending your fingernail back is more painful than getting knocked unconscious yet we still do things that cause those types of pain all the time. No pain? No gain.
We probably all agree that getting really really good on a skateboard is one of the most difficult things you can do on the planet. And to a lot of us, getting really good means more than having a strong flatground game. It means getting up on some rails, flinging yourself through some airspace, putting your frame in dangerous territory between all sorts of perilous objects (see Clint Walker). And the prospect of serious injury is high. That’s why it’s so hard to be great, you have to survive. Personally, I’m willing to risk suffering a little bit of pain, but only as long as I can skate again tomorrow. You? *I’m also way more afraid of Doctor Bills than pain. -Paul Zitzer