Last Christmas I told my Aunt and cousin that I would like to learn how to snowboard. My brother in law Greg was going to join me and it was to be a legendary adventure possibly involving several broken bones and many trips to the hospital. I mentioned this to my aunt and cousin as their whole family were avid snowboarders and skiers and I was hoping to score the lending of equipment so that I would not have to go out and buy my own. They did happily lend the equipment but the idea never really took off because it costs about $100 to go to a ski hill around here and at the time (and even now) that’s a lot of scratch to spend learning to go down a hill quickly, and falling a lot.
Today is the start of a long weekend for me and we just had a lovely amount of snow fall and it’s above freezing today (about 5 or 6 degrees Celsius – about 40 F for my American readers). And so I decided that today would be the day that I learned how to board on snow!
Why you might be asking. Because if videogames have taught me anything (and they have taught me plenty) snowboarding is awesome. Observe:
Anyways, I set out to learn to snowboard today and after driving around to find the least populated sledding hill I did a couple of quick runs on the Armour Heights Public School yard where there is a short hill. I felt I got the hang of that pretty quick and moved on to the hill in front of the courthouse.
The hill is not too steep really, but it’s nice and long and I figured a good training ground for a first time snowboarder. Turns out I was right and while I fell a number of times on my first few attempts I was able to stay upright for the length of the hill by about the fifth or sixth run. I could not, and still cannot after probably twenty runs at it, steer very well or gracefully stop. But considering that the only pointers I got about snowboarding were about a year ago in my Grandma’s living room I feel I did pretty well. By the end I was asserting that I was only going to do ‘one more run’ about three or four times and during that span landed a small jump and nearly landed a more energetic launch off the same small jump.
As far as Day One is concerned with no outside instruction I’m calling this a success, hopefully tomorrow will yield the same amount of growth, it would be nice to be able to steer and stop!
No comments:
Post a Comment