What If I Tried To Learn To Snowboard?
Inspired by Tom Singleton in yesterday's blog, I spent yesterday learning to snowboard.
The rules are simple if not a bit challenging to commit to muscle memory. Much like skiing, just less forgiving.
- Downhill edge of the board must be kept raised in the air
- Downhill edge of the board must be kept raised in the air
- Downhill edge of the board must be kept raised in the air
There, now we've covered the three important rules. There are others of course, but they don't much matter if you can't follow the top three, because you will fall every time you miss on one of these three rules, and the falls can hurt pretty bad. I fell more times than I wished to count.
Even one fall can really hurt, because you have both legs pinned to a pivot spot so you are hitting full force with only your hands or shoulders or butt to take the impact. Not recommended.
I had a few other issues as well, between the countless falls
- steering
- stopping
So how did I do?
Well, the last fall that I took at 2 hours before the lift closed smashed me up pretty badly. I can still move everything, but the left side is not so well.
The smash against the snow was so hard that I really thought I must have broken something. Took off my snowboard and just sat on it to ride to the bottom of the hill, after spending about 20 minutes sitting in the middle of the slope trying to remember how to breathe again.
My recommendation for anyone over 50 is leave it to the younger guys. Forget about all that stuff on the front page of my blog about boldness has genius power and magic in it. Those falls hurt. Not worth it.
Paula took some video of me coming down the slope. These are unprocessed quicktime files so unless you have some pretty big bandwidth might choke your pipe, but here they are just in case. And no, I have no idea why they are sideways nor how to fix it. (20 megs each approx)
Coming Down Bunny Slope Camera At Bottom
Coming Down Bunny Slope Camera Following Behind
