I’ve been tucked away in Maine this past week with my parents and brother. I was only planning on a long weekend but with work about to get crazy, it seemed like a good time to get away. Yesterday we decided to try the local ski bump. My brother recently took up snow boarding, which I have never done, and the small and relatively inexpensive mountain was a good opportunity to give it a shot.

I struggled quite a lot in the beginners play pen, so after three runs down that we decided to hit the slopes. The idea being that the flatness of the bunny slope actually made it more difficult to get up on edge, which for a beginner is imperative to enable controlled movement. If you aren’t on an edge, you soon will be, but not necessarily the one you intend. Without a lot of slope to lean in to, you’re more likely to be off edge and sliding around.

Things immediately improved.

Thankfully we only committed to a half day, and a short half day at that for me. The inefficiencies of learning a new activity had me drained pretty quickly. I decided to get off the slopes before seriously injuring myself due to fatigue.

Maybe it’s because I’m an old dog learning a new trick, but the pain factor seems too high for snowboarding at this point in my life. Like, it’s great feeling when you’re cruising, but there’s that rogue edge looming. If you loose focus for a second, or bungle a transition from one edge to the other, it’s all over – at least for the beginner. I was lucky to get away with as little damage as I did, but I caught the back side edge at one point and my rear end was leveraged into the ground with the quickness. The shock went all the way up my back to my head.

Perhaps it was like that when I was learning to ski, and I was too young and small to care, but there isn’t that ever present feeling in the back of my head that things could get extremely painful at any moment when I’m on skis. I’m not sure that feeling ever goes away on a board, or at least I’m not sure I’m willing to put in the work to get there if it does. Heck, I haven’t been skiing in years so if I’m going to spend that kind of money in a day, I’d rather not kill myself. Still, I had a lot of fun and I’m actually not too bad for a beginner. 🙂