Working the Lip

When you watch pro surfing you often hear the announcers comment on how a contestant ‘really worked the lip’, or ‘mastered that bottom turn’. Today I saw the crossover into mountain biking when I just about lost it a few times going down and coming up and I realized, that's where you really show what you've got. It's at the edge. It's when you're out to the limit and you slip beyond; kind of like Purim. To go out and back safely, to extend beyond the interface between phases, that’s what the experts do. And so here again we see in certain sports something that reflects a very basic setup: recognizing that there are limits on the top side and the bottom side and that we are to be pushing those limits and establishing skills that people didn't have before. I mean there are skateboarders and snowboarders and surfers and mountain bikers that are doing things now that 50 years ago (when I was growing up with a bike and a skateboard), we would have never even imagined possible. And now they have competitions and shows and what are they doing? They're pushing on the edges. Is it like that in every thing? It's worth thinking about.