From: cnquinn@spectrum.cs.unsw.oz.au (Clark Quinn)
Newsgroups: alt.surfing
Subject: Snowboard report
Date: 6 Oct 92 06:00:54 GMT
Reply-To: cnquinn@spectrum.cs.unsw.oz.au (Clark Quinn)
Organization: none

Forgive me, mother, for I have sinned, it has been more than a week
since my last surf.  However....

the weekend before last my wife and I finally broke down and took off
for our first Ausski.  LeAnn was on skis as usual, but having started
snowboarding while in Pittsburgh, I took a snowboard instead.  The bus
tour was somewhat disorganized, and got us up to the mountains after 1
AM, with a 6:00 AM wakeup call for a 6:30 breakfast before skiing.
Bleah.  We decided to take the Ski Tube up to Blue Cow on Saturday and
ride the bus to Thredbo on Sunday.

My first snowboarding experience consisted of spending most of the time
anywhere but on my feet, so on the second trip I took a lesson.  I
highly recommend this to other surfer/skiers.  Despite my knowledge of
the principle *weight forward*, it was just too easy to crank a left
turn (a frontside cutback for this regular foot) with my weight back on
the tail.  That's a quick trip to a bum plant.  The lesson really
helped me straighten out and get going, to the extent that I was riding
advanced runs on my 4th day of snowboarding (should I mention that it
was soft snow that made everything easy?  Nah...).  

That was all a year and a half ago, so I was understandably a bit
rusty.  Fortunately, the same was true of my wife on her skis, so we
spent a trip or two on the bunny slopes before advancing to
intermediate runs.  Again, the snow (it was beautiful spring conditions
with the weather right around 0 degrees C, soft snow) was forgiving so
by the end of the first day we were working on our form on an advanced
run.  Of course, that meant I fell a bit, but hey, if you're not
falling you're not learning.  The smooth bits were okay, but bumps were
a bit of a chore.  I did flash on one section where carving through the
bumps was like adapting to a changing wave, here comes a section (bump)
drop down below it, now off the top of the next one, carve around this,
etc.  It's just harder to keep the weight forward the whole time when
your feet are fixed to the board.  No running to the nose to get the
speed for the section, or dropping back for the turn.

It felt particularly hard since if you can't maintain an even weighting
between the feet (hard as a beginner), you have to err on the side of
caution and put most of your weight on the front foot.  This, in my
case, is the left leg which isn't my stronger.  It can get quite tiring
(sewing machine leg).

One nice thing was that almost no one, even the young thrashers, seemed
to be doing any better, until I saw one guy go through a bump section
with excellent style and grace.  It was a bit ego-diminishing, but also
gave me a goal.  Besides, too much cockiness can be dangerous; my worst
fall came when I decided to see how elegant I could look without waving
my arms about.  I held them down and was doing okay till suddenly my
chest hurt.  That was because I had caught an edge, I realized in
retrospect, but the transition from standing up and cruising at good
speed to lying face down on the ground with major trauma was
essentially instantaneous.  Whoof!

The second day wasn't quite as nice, since Thredbo has most of it's
advanced terrain at the bottom of the hill sort of like this:

	       ______ 
       ___----- 
      / 
     / 
    / 
   /

and lower is where the snow disappears from first.  Also, there's a lot
of traversing to get around and traversing is most miserable on a
snowboard.  No legs/poles!  To top it off, Thredbo has lots of T&J-Bar
lifts.  Yuck!  However, our technique had improved and when tree-skiing
was the only way to get around the mud patch on "Dream Run" (more of a
nightmare), I was able to handle it.  I also took a few trips through
the half-pipe.  I wasn't going for major air like some, but after an
ignominious start, got a couple of off-the-lips.

At the end of the second day I finally got a technique wired that I
really felt comfortable with even in moderate bumps, but then my legs
gave out and I lost it.  I'll have to try again next year!

Yowza, and hoping for some time for surf on Friday!  Bloody grant
proposals, exams, conference deadlines, grumble, mumble....

-- Clark

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 _--_|\    Clark N. Quinn 
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