The Excitement of Snowboarding

Hi Readers,

After coming back from my recent snowboarding trip to Chestnut Mountain with some friends, I thought I would write a blog post about snowboarding. I snowboarded for the first time in grade 10, and since then I have really fallen in love with it, much more so than skiing. I have my own board and all the equipment, which are currently a thousand miles away in Vancouver (grr). I really miss the mountains in Vancouver - I never thought about how convenient it was to live by so many ski hills until it was all gone, to be able to have a choice of three different ski resorts to go to within an hour's drive from my house. Now I have to drive at least 4 hours to reach a ski resort that is much less in caliber than the ones I had. Such is life.

I'll start off by saying that snowboarding is hard. Period. I haven't yet met a single person who has gotten through their first day of snowboarding without lots of bruises, sore knees, and butts. It may not seem like it, but there is a very big difference between having your body face the direction that you are traveling (ski) and having your body perpendicular to the direction your are traveling (snowboard). It makes for a lot of face plants at first, especially when learning to turn. There are two ways to orient a snowboard so that it is parallel to the slope (for gliding). The regular style means left-foot forward (so left side of body is facing downhill), and it is called regular because most people fall under this category. The goofy style is for right-foot forward, and is less common. To determine whether a person is regular or goofy, the first time they snowboard, an instructor will often shove them without any warning, and take note of which foot they step out with first. It will become their leading foot.

Unlike skiers, snowboarders do have an easier time with stopping. To stop, all a snowboarder has to do is to put the board perpendicular to the slope and push down hard on the edge, so that it pushes the snow downhill. Since there are two possible ways of putting a snowboard perpendicular to the slope, the terminology of toe-side and heel-side edges refers to the side of the snowboard that the pressure is being put on. Heel-side is the more natural way, where a snowboarder faces toward the bottom of a hill and puts pressure on their heels, while toe-side is where the snowboarder faces uphill and puts pressure on their toes to stop.

Snowboarders generally start learning with zigzags down the hill while alternating between regular and goofy style, as well as how to stop toe side and heel side. After this is done, they begin to learn how to turn. A turn is basically a move to go from toe-side to heel-side or vice versa, and when done properly, it looks like tracing a semicircle down the slope. The notion of "turning" is the key focus of snowboarders and is basically the precursor to carving. Skiers can carve by transferring their weight between the right skis and left skis between turns, and snowboarders can carve by transferring their weight between toe-side to heel-side. Snowboarders can carve simply by joining turns together to form an S-shape maneuver, and eventually by making the S-shape narrower.

It's during turns that snowboarders are most likely to fall on their butts. In the beginning, switching from toe-side to heel-side is fraught with dangers of falling, especially to knees and butts. I'm usually a regular style snowboarder, but I've been trying to learn carving goofy-style, and I've been falling as much as a beginner has. Regular and goofy style really are not transferable between each other, so I've come to love the pain that accompanies my attempts at goofy-style.

Despite its intricacies, I feel like snowboarding is really not that hard to learn. The first day is the worst. I remember the first day I learned snowboarding. Despite being tired as hell that night, I could not fall asleep because my knees and butt hurt so much. In my opinion, snowboarding is most easily learned when several consecutive days are spent learning snowboarding. That way no progress is lost and you can progress quickly to carving. Once carving is mastered, snowboarding becomes so much more fun than skiing. Plus it has the "cool" factor.

I'm pretty sure that I will not stick around in Illinois for graduate school. Wherever I may end up, I want to make snowboarding a part of my life there for the next 5 years. There's just something about it that makes it so much fun. Perhaps it's the thrill of flying down the hill on the edge of your control, while constantly pushing the boundaries of that control. Knowing that the control may disappear the next second and you might crash and generate a huge puff of snow, but living for the present all the same. It's how I want to live my life.

-FCDH