Snowboarding

First of, my apologies for ditching everyone at the meeting and demo practice on thursday. Jason is home for a week and we decided to go on a quick winter family outing to Jasper. Its been three years since I strapped into my snowboard the last time and it very much felt for a moment like I had no idea what to do.

It was so interesting how I went through all the stages of learning how to (basic) snowboard in that one day. At the end, I was very comfortable doing most of the green and blue runs at Marmot and enjoying myself. Nothing crazy but it was fun and felt good. In the eveing, I decided to look up some videos on how to snowboard better. I noticed all the pretty sore bits, my lower legs in particular and I figured learning a bit more may also help me be less hard on certain areas.

I did watch a few instructions and was pumped to try out all of the suggestions and watch myself improve. The next morning, I went on the hill trying to apply it all, stay square to your board, hips and shoulders aligned and don't twist, bent and soft knees, 60% weight on the lead leg, 40% on the back and so on. Well, to my surprise, it started to look like I'm going backwards. My legs hurt with every curve, I kept falling down and two times in a row real hard on my butt. I found myself getting more scared, not wanting to fall on my hurting areas again, my hand still swollen from a fall the day before and I realized this doesn't work, I'm going to get seriously hurt. I was debating calling it a day and accepting that I may be too old to do this two days in a row. Last time we went, three years ago, was also just a one day outing and its been many, many years before that.

It was still morning though and a lot of time left in the day and I just wasn't quite ready to give up I guess. I finally decided to try to completely ignore all the "rules" I wanted to follow to improve my snowboarding. After a few minutes of just allowing myself to feel when it's right to turn and let my body do what it had to do to move the board and catch the balance and regulate the speed, I started getting into the groove again. I stopped falling (so often) and after a while, my legs seemed fine, I mean hurting but the fun was making it tolerable. While going up the chairlift later that day I told Jason about what had changed and I heard myself say:" I think I just take everything too literal and I was overthinking it. I watched the videos, they all said the same so it must be true, therefore I need to follow it to the T". And all of a sudden I thought of my Kung Fu and a few of my instructors pointing this out to me before. I'm not sure how this translates into my Kungfu but I have to recognize the pattern here. It seems weirdly unrelated, maybe but it certainly gave me a bunch of food for thought!