Like a lot of people who move to a part of the U.S. with mountains, after moving to Colorado in my twenties, I knew I wanted to pick up a snow sport. I mean, why live at the base of the Rocky Mountains and not take advantage of the outdoor activities that are literally at your doorstep? For me, the major snow sport I wanted to learn was snowboarding.
Why not skiing? Well, not to take sides in the eternal two-planker (skier) vs. knuckle dragger (snowboarder) debate, but I tried skiing once while I was in college. I ended up taking an epic tumble on my first run and tore up a knee. I learned two quick lessons from that experience. First, taking lessons from a professional is probably a good idea when it comes to a dangerous and difficult sport. Two, strapping a long plank to each foot and sliding down a mountain on them feels incredibly unnatural for me.
So, as an older and wiser 20something, I knew that snowboarding would be the better choice for me. Plus, I was a skateboarder as a kid, and it seemed like the skillset would translate. Decision made, I joined a couple of friends one cold Saturday morning to drive up to one of the many ski resorts available to Denverites and we signed up for a day of lessons for snowboarding newbies. None of us had ever ridden before and we figured that misery loves company and we could laugh at each other as total beginners. We couldn’t have been more right.
What I largely remember from that first day was spending most of it flat on my back or trying to pick myself up after yet another fall - often falling again, even before I was fully standing. It was exhausting, miserable, cold, and frustrating, all at once. My friends were experiencing similar levels of little successes surrounded by a lot of failures. But, those little successes built up slowly over the day, and with each one, I could get a glimmer of how much fun it would be to actually be good at snowboarding.
We all left the mountain that day feeling sore and worn out but also convinced that we would love snowboarding if we could just figure it out. I ended up going back to the mountain the next weekend to take the next step in my snowboarding education. For me, and most newbies, the tough thing to learn initially was to transition from one edge of the board to the other. We called this ‘connecting our turns’. It was a hard concept to grasp at that point. The movement felt very confusing and for me, every time I tried to make that transition, I fell. My first run on that second day on the mountain was absolute torture. I think it took me an hour to get down to the lift line, with all the falling. Basically, I was exactly where I left things off at the end of the first lesson.
As I was slowly making my way down the mountain on that first run, I remember seeing a little kid (maybe 5 or 6) who was also a newbie on the snowboard. He was getting private lessons from an adult, who I think was his mom. I remember seeing him coming down the mountain looking a lot like me. Lots of falling, looking very uncomfortable. As I rode the lift back up to the top of the run, I looked down and saw the same kid on the slopes below. But, he was actually snowboarding! He was carefully transitioning from one edge to the other. Once the lift passed overhead, I remember thinking, if this 5-year-old can figure it out, so can I. When I got off the lift and started my run, I was simply determined to connect my first turn. No hesitation. Just do it. If I fall, I fall. So, I simply did what the instructor had been trying to tell me to do in shifting my weight and moving from one edge to the other, and… it worked. Clumsy, sure. But, it worked and I didn’t crash and burn. Then, I did it again and again. It was truly a moment where a light bulb turned flipped on in my brain. Literally from one second to the next, it made sense.
Here are two lessons I learned that day.
- Sometimes you need to take a leap (or tiny step) of faith. The challenge in making that edge to edge transition is very small, but it seemed like a chasm to me before I did it for the first time. Every time I tried, I fell. So, there was fear that I would just keep falling and landing on my back. Finally having the mindset that I wasn’t going to worry about the outcome and just do it was the key. It was a combination of belief and simply throwing caution to the wind. It’s amazing that if we actually force ourselves to do something in the face of a little fear, how well it can turn out.
- External motivation can help sometimes. Clearly, my internal desire to learn how to snowboard hadn’t done the trick. But, seeing a 5-year-old learn what I was trying to accomplish was the push that I needed. While I generally believe that internal drive is the best motivator, sometimes we need that little kick in the pants from the outside. Peer pressure isn’t always a bad thing when it gets you to grow and learn something new.
While there was a lot more learning to do before I was racing down double black diamond runs, riding through the trees, or surfing on knee-deep powder in the years ahead, I never forgot that second day on the board and the moment when things clicked.
