Snowboarding Day 1

So, my previous post mentions snowboarding a couple of times but never really goes into detail because I didn't want to make the entry excessively long. So, I'll talk about it here, so you can fill in the day or two's worth of info I left out.

For starters, I never skateboarded or surfed prior to this, so I knew it was going to be essentially learning and entirely new skill, and I was right. Despite having experience skiing, the only good it did me was knowing how frustrating it was learning that, and how to deal with falling a lot without driving myself crazy. And fall a lot I most certainly did. Jenn and Tom G. where there with me the first time to go up the lift and tell me about the basics, but after a couple of minutes of me standing up, going a foot or two then falling down, I told them they could go on ahead and I would work on what they talked about without them having to wait around for my ass. Good call, as it turns out, cause it took me about an hour and a half to get down that run. I fell. Boy did I fall. I fell in every way imaginable. I did the first face plant of my life, which was just hilarious to me, and allowed me to get some good thinking done in the solitude of my self-made snow cave.

I hit my head several times from falling while turning to the right, something which I never got the hang of the first day. I did some damage to my left wrist as well, landing poorly and putting too much weight on it, but that much I expected. I also bruised my tailbone, which I expected. I got tired very quickly, but I took it in chunks and focused on one little bit at a time, and by the time I reached the steep part of the run I could stay up long enough to kinda stop on my own. I started to get my balance I'd say about halfway down the run, and by the end I had kinda figured out how to get down fakey. I decided I felt more comfortable going down fakey than trying to learn to cut right and crashing all the time, so after I got back to the lift, I went back up, and went back down again all fakey, which took me like 10 minutes. Big difference in times.

I ran into Natascha and Ceska and Sammy the second time down, and come to find out Sam had hurt her knee and was having a hard time getting down the mountain. Tascha and Ceska were doing alright, snowbunny style on their skis all the way. I didn't realize it was their first time skiing as well. I just kinda thought the three of them were poor skiers. My third time down I saw the ski patrol coming to pick up Sammy, and I made it down pretty fast, my fakey style proving to be sound and allowing me to adjust to standing on the board while moving and getting any amount of speed, though going fakey one can't really ever get going THAT fast, so I realized by the end of the run that style was going to hold me back. Besides, the whole time I was telling myself that I wasn't actually snowboarding as long as I was using that style.

My last run of the day I went down with Jenn, and I challenged myself to really give it a go, and I kept up with her the whole time, never falling once. I was really proud of myself to have accomplished that in one day of snowboarding, and I was fine with having done it fakey knowing that the next time we went up to the mountain I would train myself to turn correctly and then I could really claim to have learned how to do it. I felt really good about myself for the first time in a long while, having gone from zero to something workable in a day.