Walking down stairs: Do you look?

[Jack of Arcades]

[ QUOTE ]
[ QUOTE ]
If you ever get a chance to see the beginning of Hawaii Five-O, watch Jack Lord speed-walk down the stairs.

He does it really fast, without looking. I always thought that was very cool, and eventually learned how to do it myself. It's hard to describe, and I can't do it now as well as I could, because I used to be the flawless stair master, like my guru Jack Lord, and that's a high standard to maintain indeed. But anyway, you can get into a rhythm of doing it that's quite safe, involving basically little more than kicking your feet out in front of you rapidly while maintaining forward momentum. The stairs just rise up to meet them and then fall away behind. Get good at it and you can do it blur fast, like machine gun fire or tap dancing, without ever looking or feeling at all unsafe.

It's pretty cool to do and see, but it's a little bit tricky to learn because you have to take a chance on falling to get comfortable with it. Kind of like riding a bike is hard and a bit scary to do when you first learn it, because you have to surrender to the possibility of a painful fall if you want to master it. It's quite a time saver though, so well worth learning. You'll fly down the steps.

[/ QUOTE ]

Blarg, you've set a high standard for yourself, but this was your best post ever. [img]/images/graemlins/grin.gif[/img]

[/ QUOTE ]

This is why I love OOT. Great posts on dumb topics.

[peachy]

if im used to those stairs or know them then no problem - i dont have to look...but if ive rarely gone up or down them i occasionally will glance down or glance down at the beginning

[Lazymeatball]

[ QUOTE ]
If you ever get a chance to see the beginning of Hawaii Five-O, watch Jack Lord speed-walk down the stairs.

He does it really fast, without looking. I always thought that was very cool, and eventually learned how to do it myself. It's hard to describe, and I can't do it now as well as I could, because I used to be the flawless stair master, like my guru Jack Lord, and that's a high standard to maintain indeed. But anyway, you can get into a rhythm of doing it that's quite safe, involving basically little more than kicking your feet out in front of you rapidly while maintaining forward momentum. The stairs just rise up to meet them and then fall away behind. Get good at it and you can do it blur fast, like machine gun fire or tap dancing, without ever looking or feeling at all unsafe.

It's pretty cool to do and see, but it's a little bit tricky to learn because you have to take a chance on falling to get comfortable with it. Kind of like riding a bike is hard and a bit scary to do when you first learn it, because you have to surrender to the possibility of a painful fall if you want to master it. It's quite a time saver though, so well worth learning. You'll fly down the steps.

[/ QUOTE ]

I don't know if I use the exact same method as you, but at UMass they have these 20+ story dorms and I routinely found it faster for me to fly down the stairs than take the elevator. It's all about the balance and the rythym. If I recall I used to take two steps at a time, but they had iregularly sized steps. The weirdest part is that it involves zero effort above the knees.

[Blarg]

Though you take two steps and I take one, it might be similar, especially since you're mentioning doing nothing below the knees. For me it's little more than a flick of the lower leg, just enough to get in the way of the upcoming step, and a really light landing on the ball of the foot before an almost instant flick out again. I barely land and barely have to push off, because the momentum does all the work and I just supply the contact points with the earth. Kind of like a slide, or a controlled fall. Once I set the length of the twitch and how fast I make it, the whole staircase is taken care of, if the steps are even, and I just go along for the ride and do some sightseeing. My upper legs barely move, which is one reason I compared it to tapdancing. It doesn't require that kind of skill at all, though, just the confidence to ride on top of a smooth, controlled fall. It's kind of like you're skiing downhill on your own knees, with your lower legs as the flickering skis, off doing their own thing, without your conscious intervention.

The only time you have to pay attention to them is when getting the measure of the first stair. If it becomes instinctual enough, you can just start in automatically at the top of any step, and don't even have to take a first step to get the feel. That would probably take most people some practice, though.

Definitely balance and rhythm is key, because you're not really walking, and never fully landing; it's more like skiing over the very edges of the steps, where you don't hold the feet steady, but hold their rhythm steady as you fall.

[pokerdirty]

yes, but when i'm walking up, i look up her skirt.

[BottlesOf]

Yea, you should not be worrying about how to appear elegant when descending stairs or any other time. And you DEFINITELY should not be making polls about it.

[IndieMatty]

Theres no way you possibly wrote this much about walking down stairs. Impossible. I refuse to read.

[jakethebake]

[ QUOTE ]
Theres no way you possibly wrote this much about walking down stairs. Impossible. I refuse to read.

[/ QUOTE ]

You have to read his first post in this thread. It is a gem! [img]/images/graemlins/grin.gif[/img]

[Cyrus]

Nude Descending Staircase and clearly glancing down.

[ChipWrecked]

[ QUOTE ]
Yea, you should not be worrying about how to appear elegant when descending stairs or any other time. And you DEFINITELY should not be making polls about it.

[/ QUOTE ]

'Elegant' might be a bad (ghey) choice of words, I admit. But this thread is generating some interesting discussion, so I believe I'm under the banning radar here. And Cyrus just posted a cubist nude. Sweet.