Learning to snowboard involves a lot of sitting down, often forcefully. Photo: Bryan Walker // Unsplash.
Last spring, while on a brief tour-de-España, I tried kiteboarding for the first time. Like many others before me I thought it would be a cinch with my prior surfing experience. I couldn’t have been more wrong. I also apparently didn’t learn my lesson, because this past weekend I tried snowboarding for the first time, and once again, ate a fat piece of humble pie.
I’ve been skiing since I was pretty young, introduced to it through semi-annual family trips to the mountains that petered off by around age 12. I rediscovered my love for the sport in college, and it’s been a large part of who I am since. But in all that time, I never once got on a snowboard. As a kid, I had my hands full just learning how to ski, and in college with so many great skiers around me who had grown up in mountain towns, I was so focused on just keeping up that taking precious slope-time to try and learn an entirely new way of sliding down the mountain didn’t seem practical.
The legendary comfort of snowboard boots was the only expectation I had that was truly met. Photo: Joshua Reddekopp // Unsplash.
A couple weeks ago on a weekend trip up to Palisades Tahoe, a friend and I (both of us skiers who had never snowboarded) decided to rent snowboards and give it a shot. The conditions didn’t look like anything I’d hate to miss out on, and having someone else to learn with seemed to be an opportunity. Shunning lessons, we swung by a rental shop on the way to the mountain.
“Give me the beginner setup, but not the super beginner set up,” I told the clerk at Tahoe Dave’s rental shop. They’ve heard this before. I’m positive. So I did my best to reassure the clerk that I was not one of them. “I’m a pretty decent skier, I surf and skate so I’m sure I’ll pick things up pretty quickly.”
From the second I strapped both feet onto my board, I realized nothing in my previous board-sports experience had prepared me for this. I tried to stand up and promptly fell back onto my ass for what would be the first of many times that morning. My second attempt had me fall over onto my hands and knees, my ass wiggling in the air as I tried to tip myself back up and onto my feet. I was expecting something like the flat stability of a skateboard, but if anything the experience felt vaguely similar to walking a slackline with a thin margin of error to tip in either direction before overbalancing was inevitable.
A bluebird day with no fresh snow to miss out on seemed like the perfect day to try snowboarding. In retrospect, fresh snow might have hurt less. Photo: WS
We were at the top of a low rise leading down to the bunny slope chairlift. Finally getting my feet under me I began the rocking snowboard shuffle to tip myself over the edge. Slowly, gravity took over until all of a sudden I was sliding and then whump, I was back on my ass in the snow again. It took fifteen minutes before I had teeteringly made it the 50 or so yards to the bunny slope chairlift.
A few runs later I had grasped a couple basic concepts. I could slide my way down the hill on my heelside, but had yet to really figure out how to move diagonally down the slope in the direction that I wanted. Toeside was a horrifying, unbalanced realm where couldn’t see what was in front of me. I wanted nothing to do with it. The same was more or less true for my fellow snowboarder-in-training.
Frustrated by our perceived lack of progress, we decided to throw ourselves into the deep end, riding the Far East express up to take “Easy Street” down, a long blue run that criss-crossed down the mountain and didn’t look too steep. In retrospect, that was wrong.
Me, all damn day. Mattias Olsson // Unsplash.
After years of looking down on beginners on the slopes and getting frustrated by the masses of snowboarders sitting down in the middle of the run at locations like Big Bear in Southern California, on that long, “easy” run I was one of them and I hated it. In a fit of “fuck it” energy at the top of a steeper slope with a long flat section in front of me that I didn’t want to unbuckle for (again), I tried picking up some real speed, only to catch an edge and go down, hard, on the icy morning groomer. My ears ringing, I gingerly made my way down the rest of the mountain, went back to the car, and got my skis.
I know I’m not the only one who has thought their experience would translate from one sport to another better. Or who would overestimate their abilities relative to the rest of the population. While I’m sure we could dive into the psychological fallacies I was prone to in thinking I was better prepared than most for learning to snowboard, I think the philosophical implications are much more interesting. At what point does learning/knowing other boardsports help? What is it that is so different about snowboarding from skiing, skateboarding, or surfing?
All of a sudden, I was one of the human roadblocks I used to scoff at. Photo: Cristina-Munteanu // Unsplash.
As far as the first question goes, I can only really speak to my own experience. And while I’m sure that some of my surfing and skateboarding helped, it felt like I was starting at zero. Which I was. The problem was that I had a strong visualization of what snowboarding would be like – I saw myself carving down the slope with the traction and control that I feel on a skateboard, when in reality snowboarding has a lot more slipperiness to it, a constant omnidirectional slide. Compared to surfing, it felt a lot more like the few times I’ve surfed finless than surfing regularly, again with that uncontrollable slide. In that way, my previous experiences might have even hindered me, as I was forced to reconcile my visualization with reality. And unlike skiing, having one’s feet connected to the same board presented its own challenges.
All that being said, I definitely value the experience of trying something so completely new. I’ll probably try snowboarding again, but I’ll (hopefully) reign in my expectations before doing so. And I’ll do my best to hold onto this experience for the next time I try something new and step out of my comfort zone.
The sensation of being a beginner was difficult and embarrassing in a venue that I normally feel so confident in. And that’s something I could stand to feel a little bit more, to take myself off of the high horse I so often find myself in the places that I play. Much as I might hate it in the moment, it’s good to be humbled.
