There comes a time when you've been skating for a while that your brain starts to get permanently rewired and normal walking just starts feeling completely pointless. Not difficult or even slightly harder, just incredibly inefficient and dull. Walking gives you zero style points, there's absolutely no opportunity to get creative, the very best you can be at walking is completely forgettable. Who wants that? I mean seriously, even if you tried to come up with an interesting walk, you'd just end up looking like a bit of a dick
You notice it first when you're out in town with non-skater mates and they're happily walking in straight lines between shops like NPCs while you're unconsciously scanning the environment like the Terminator if he was programmed by Blueprint videos and three cans of Monster. Every curb suddenly becomes a potential slappy. Every bank starts whispering to you. You can't even walk through the city centre anymore without mentally planning lines past the Council House. You'll be halfway through a conversation and suddenly drift off because you've spotted a perfect little marble ledge outside some building nobody else has ever looked at twice in their life.
And stairs. Stairs become genuinely insulting. Three steps? Four? Why are we all calmly accepting this when a perfectly good handrail exists right there? Even if you've never boardslid (boardslided, boardslaid) anything in your life, your brain still registers rails differently once you skate. You stop seeing architecture as architecture and start seeing it as either "spot", "nearly a spot", or "spot ruined by knobs".
The worst part is how skating changes your understanding of distance. Non-skaters will say things like, "It's only a fifteen minute walk," and you immediately think, "Yeah but it's like a two minute push." Suddenly everywhere feels bizarrely far on foot but strangely close on a skateboard. You start judging journeys entirely based on push-efficiency and ground quality. Rough tarmac becomes a personal attack. Brick pavements feel like war crimes. You'll cross an entire road just to hit smoother ground for twenty metres because once you've experienced fresh car park concrete with decent bearings, your standards change forever.
Then there's the little physical habits skating gives you that make you look faintly odd to the general public. Constantly hopping onto curbs instead of using dropped kerbs like a normal person. Speed checking down mild hills in regular shoes. Randomly balancing on one foot while waiting for buses because your legs have developed permanent manual reflexes. Looking behind you every ten seconds as if a security guard might suddenly emerge from Greggs and tell you to move on.
Skating also completely destroys your relationship with weather. Before skating, rain was just weather. Mild inconvenience at worst. After skating, you start reacting to drizzle like a medieval farmer watching locusts arrive. You'll wake up, hear rain against the window and immediately calculate whether roads might dry by 3pm. Every skater in the UK develops the same tragic instinct of checking weather apps with the intensity of stock traders watching the FTSE. Nottingham skaters especially know this pain because our weather somehow manages to be both damp and windy at the exact same time, which is ideal conditions if your goal is to make every spot feel horrible.
And once you properly get into skating, walking loses its sense of flow entirely. Skateboarding tricks your brain into expecting momentum all the time. Pushing feels smooth. Carving feels smooth. Even bombing somewhere slightly too fast feels smooth in a very stupid way. Walking just feels like buffering. You become hyper aware of how long humans actually take to move anywhere without wheels attached. It's why skaters are always accidentally late as well. A skater's understanding of travel time is based entirely on ideal pushing conditions, zero pedestrians, dry ground and the complete absence of hills.
But the strangest thing skating ruins is the way you look at ordinary places. Multi-storey car parks stop being car parks. School playgrounds stop being playgrounds. Empty Tesco loading bays suddenly start looking cinematic at night under orange streetlights. You start appreciating weird little textures and shapes nobody else notices. A tiny mellow bank tucked behind some bins can become the best part of your entire week. Most people walk through cities seeing what places are supposed to be. Skaters see what they could be for thirty seconds with enough speed.
That's probably why skaters end up wandering around aimlessly so much as well. You're never fully "just walking". You're scouting. Even without your board. Every session permanently changes the map in your head. You remember places according to tricks landed there, security encounters, near misses, injuries, perfect ground, terrible ground, and whether the local shop sells decent drinks after 8pm.
So yeah, skateboarding absolutely ruins normal walking. But honestly, after you've properly experienced flying down smooth pavement with your mates on a summer evening heading towards a spot you probably shouldn't skate, normal walking was never really going to compete anyway.
