Yesterday, my second day of snowboarding class, was not as good as my first lesson. In this lesson, I was learning to connect toe-edge and heel-edge turns to make S-turns all the way down the hill. These moves are essential to learning how to carve on a board. For beginners riding a normal boarding stance, riding on the heel edge is usually easiest, and I took to it like a fish to water the first day, hardly falling at all. I didn’t work a lot on the toe edge because it’s harder and a bit scary – you’re basically riding backward down the hill, facing the top of the mountain instead of the bottom, plus, the toe edge on this specific hill goes a lot faster because of the grade. So yesterday, riding on my toe edge as much of my heel edge presented quite a challenge, and I didn’t quite rise to meet it.
One might not realize how punny that statement is. Bluntly, I spent most of the day on my ass, and it hurt. A lot. I have a bruise so large on my left buttcheek that the Guv, a seasoned athlete, declared it to be the worst, largest bruise he’s ever seen on anyone ever. It is black, blue, purple, green, and yellow and even a bit red, and it’s the size of a super-large grapefruit. In other words, it covers my whole left side. Looking at yesterday made me nauseous, but that may be because I also hit my head (helmet!) pretty hard several times while trying not to fall on my butt yet again. (My head's fine today.) My left knee sported a nice shiner this morning as well. Yesterday was not a good day.
And why, why did this happen to me yesterday? I was afraid. Every single – EVERY SINGLE – fall was purposeful on my part, and it was because I was afraid that I was going too fast and would end up falling harder later on down the hill. I did the S-turns – quite a few of them, actually – but never made it the whole way down the terrain because of my fear of speed. Quite frankly, I don’t know that I’ve ever been afraid in my life, except briefly after 9-11 those first few times when the Guv boarded a plane. There are times that I should be afraid and am not because I am naïve. Snowboarding may be one of these times.
I’m not quite sure how I’m going to come out on this one, especially as my mother’s coming to visit and probably won’t take well to seeing me obviously damaged. To boot, my butt really does need a few days of R&R. But the fact is, I’m not going to get seriously injured – just seriously banged up – and I want to do this badly enough because, in the end, it is very, very fun, even with the falls. Until I biff, I feel like I’m flying, and that feeling, along with loads of Motrin and sangria, counteracts this bruise and my headaches quite nicely.
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