Ha! I learned that the hard way. It's not as easy as it looks. At least not for me who has never done any skate boarding or surfing. There were a couple factors that contributed to my overall total demise. One thing was there were way too many people on the practice hill. It was like an obsticle course with folks just sitting down in the middle of the slope catching their breath or taking a break. I ran into more people than I can count. A couple were our snowboard instructor and a little kid that was probably six or seven years old! (I have a bruise on my butt in the shape of the bottom of his ski pole to prove it.)
The second thing was that we only had one day there, so I tried hills that I probably wasn't ready for because I knew I wouldn't have the chance otherwise. And I guess I was a little peer pressured into it. It was a disaster. I literally fell down that entire hill. It wasn't one giant fall, but about 20 small ones. I hit my head several times, slid over some tree roots on my back (got an expecially tough looking bruise/scratch from that one), and did the splits more than once. I fell backward, forward, sideways, I landed on my hip, shoulder, back and both my knees are bruised. It was brutal. I fell more in that one day than I have in the past ten years!
To be honest a part of me felt like quitting the first time I hit my head (I hit it hard a total of 4 times). My hat actually flew off my head I went down so hard. It looked pretty funny I'm sure, it even made me laugh, even though it was pretty painful. But I decided to stick it out. I have often wondered at the way football players dive to the turf over and over again. I have this strange curiosity about how it would feel to fall ground without using your hands to brace yourself. And to do it 20 or 30 times in a row. So with some apprehension, but also with a bit of morbid curiosity, I kept getting up and trying again. I know it's not quite the same thing, but I'd say falling down a mountain is at least generally comparable to playing a game of football. I wanted to know if I could be as tough as a football player, and I wanted to know what it felt like to be one.
After a day of experimentation the conclusion I reached was I'm probably tough enough to play in one football game. But if you told me I had to do it every Sunday I'd probably cry. It turns out that diving (or in my case falling) to the ground over and over HURTS...A LOT. I don't mean the actual fall hurts that much, because it's one of those things where if you just get up and shake it off the pain actually goes away pretty quickly. It's more the feeling that overcomes you if you sit down for a couple minutes (at any point after repeated contact with the ground) and try to get up again. If you keep moving you are OK, but if you sit down it's all over. I got up after sliding ten feet down the hill and was fine, but when I went to use the restroom I thought someone might have come in and peel me off the toilet because my legs were suddenly in revolt!
And the stiffness and soreness was so much worse and complete than I ever thought it could be. When I imagined how I'd feel afterward I was only taking into account the muscles I knew I had. I had totally neglected to include the 200 other muscles that up until my snowboarding experience had apparently never been used. I felt like a stranger in my own body. I discovered a muscle in my hip I didn't know was there and somehow made it hard to put shoes on, and one behind my right ear that, for three days, sent shooting pain down my neck whenever I smiled. I had a weird fatigue in the muscle on top of my foot that burned when I would push and ease up on the gas pedal in my car. It was bizarre. And it took me a week to recover!
But...while my first snowboarding adventure turned out to be more or less a bust, I haven't lost hope that some day I'll find myself whizzing down a mountain on a snowboard and having a fun old time. Next time I go I'm just going to do things a little differently. I might wear a football helmet for one. I might go on a less busy day too. Even though I have spent the last 10 minutes complaining about all the aches and pains, in my mind it was a really good experience. The whole thing during, and after, was very interesting to me. It was all worth it. And you want to know why? Because I came away with one (and only one) shot of me looking like a bad-ass snowboarding queen! Hell yeah! The victory is MINE!
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| You can't even tell I was about to fall! |
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