I thought of a different way of saying the same thing.
I was a professional Inline skater. I skated ramps and half pipes on inline skates. As a kid I also skateboarded. So I was decent on a ramp on a skateboard too. Actually, my ability to skate on ramps as a kid may have been a decent part of why I picked up skating ramps on inline skates. Because less than two years after I put inline skates on for the first time, I was getting paid to skate.
Anyway, surfing is different but the skills are not all that different. The first time I went surfing--and I only surfed for about a month when the circus was in California--yeah, I performed for Ringling Bros Barnum and Bailey Circus--the first time I went surfing, everyone told me: "it's so hard, you'll never be able to get up on the board."
Nonsense! I got up on my first try. It was totally natural to me. The hard part was not getting up or riding the waves. The hard part was paddling to get up speed to get back out for the next wave. Or to catch the wave in the first place.
I remember watching these kids who had been surfing all their lives do what looked like almost nothing and they were zooming back out as they paddled. So effortless. Meanwhile I was thrashing around and trying so hard when I paddled and I felt like I was going nowhere.
Also, snowboarding. I have only been on a snowboard 2x. But the first day I snowboarded, I did launches and then I decided to try the half pipe. I wasn't great. But I was better than most of the people on the mountain at the half pipe even though I wasn't that good at snowboarding.
Anyway, the idea is that related skills do cross over to some extent. So cross training is never really a bad idea even if it is not needed.
Sent from The Subterranean Workshop by Telepathy