Anything where you can get this angle of acceleration feeling, you can use that for meditation, because it puts you in the zone. And if you keep it constant, the feeling of expansion continues to build. When I skate, the whole idea is to keep a continuous feeling of acceleration, even though it's very small. A piece of calcium sits on a membrane so that any change in the relative position of gravity will make this stone roll, and therefore there will be some indication that the body is moving relative to the center of the Earth. I studied this, and there is a neurological explanation for this thing.Īcceleration stimulates a set of receptors which are in the inner ear, that connects us with the center of the Earth, by gravity. I realized that there was an aspect to lateral acceleration which made many of us feel good.

I was always trying to perfect this technique, skating in slow motion. This part of the documentary has diagrams, illustrations, and footage of longboarders and surfers carving back and forth much like Slomo does on his skates.Īnd I do on my Streetstrider. It's better to watch the film, of course. In the documentary about Slomo, there's a part at about the eight-minute mark where Kitchin talks about his theory of lateral acceleration making us feel good. Same basic feeling as moving from side to side on a longboard/skateboard or surfing.' It does have that feel of carving back and forth. One of my usual lines when someone asks me about the bike is, 'The StreetStrider has been described as skiing on land. Then I shift to a nearly straight-ahead riding style, to show them that this old guy on a bizarre bike isn't going to run them off their side of the trail. I show how, by shifting weight from one leg to the other, the bike naturally zigs and zags from side to side, the amount of zigging and zagging controllable by the rider.Īn exception is when I approach some people coming the other way on one of the park's narrow trails. This happens often - people wanting to know what the heck this weird-looking yellow 'bike' I'm riding is all about.Īfter explaining the basics, I always get around to extolling how much fun it is to ride the StreetStrider. Two groups of women asked me questions about the StreetStrider. More people than usual were out and about on the Minto Brown paved trails. Delightful, after a March that was the second wettest on record in northwest Oregon. This afternoon's ride was done in sunny 60-degree'ish weather. If I'm not able to do my StreetStrider thing for five to seven miles three days a week, I get bummed out.

Today I went StreetStriding at Minto Brown Island Park here in Salem, Oregon. I'm totally addicted to this outdoor elliptical bike, which I got about three and half months ago. A 16-minute documentary about him can be viewed on the NY Times site.

Now he's known as Slomo on the boardwalk. I wrote about him on my other blog in Slomo's simple philosophy of life: 'Do what you want to.'I shared a link to a New York Times story about this intriguing man, who used to go by the name of John Kitchin. Yesterday I discovered the tale of a marvelous 69-year-old guy who traded his medical career as a neurologist to become a nearly full-time inline skater on the San Diego oceanside boardwalk.

Slomo skater