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I’ve just come back from the slope and while being there and looking to people I suddenly felt inspired to write this post. From the name it may seem that I’m kind of a cool guy who already knows the rope, which isn’t that true. Actually I stood on a board for the first time less than year ago, so when I write ‘beginners’ what I mean is ‘first-timers’, because frankly I hardly doubt that I could be classified any higher than ‘beginner’ myself. But anyway I’ve already grasped the basics and did it in a pretty short term so I feel like, well… competent to write this. And hopefully someone will find what’s below useful.

Here we go…

Mistake 1: ‘Whenever I’m in critical situation I should listen to my body – it will tell me how to act.’

This is one is common for any type of skill you try to learn which differs from those which mother nature has given to us. I mean when our instincts were programmed – whoever did it – he didn’t think that one day man would decide to ride the piece of wood skating from the slope.

So how does this mistake show itself in snowboarding? Every time you are scared by uncontrolled high speed when skating down you tend to bend your body back away from where you’re headed. This is totally wrong. What you have to do is shift your weight forward which will allow you to relieve back foot and pull up.

This is just one common example and there are tons of others. So every time you don’t understand why you can’t control you board think about whether you do what you should or what your unqualified body tells you to do.

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Happy New Year!

Yesterday I came back from Carpathians where I had celebrated New Year with my friends (and friends of my friends, etc.) and gone for some crazy snowboarding sessions.

We arrived to Slavsko by train early in the morning on 29th of December. The extreme part of the trip began right away on our way from railroad station to the house we were staying in. Our landlord Igor came for us to the station with his neighbor Ivan, who was driving ancient soviet automobile “UAZik”, which is definetely the most popular vehicle in town due to its cross-country abilities. Amazinlgly all 11 people easily managed to get inside UAZik (well Igor was not actually inside the car — he hanged in the back seizing spare wheel :)). It turned out that our house was situated on the hill and to get there by car in winter time one should be really fearless driver. Luckily Ivan was one of those — he calmly stepped on the juice and madly rotated steering wheel while UAZik climbed up the hill hitting stony walls on each side of the narrow road.

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Woohah!

I’m a little bit tired but very happy and satisfied. On Wednesday with a couple of friends we opened new snowboarding season at Protasiv Iar here in Kyiv. Luckily for us the weather became coldish relatively early this year allowing us to start in the midst of December.

So we have been riding for 4 days in a row and yesterday we spend a whole night on the slope. I must say that some progress could be observed in our riding skills despite of such a short term. I’m pretty comfortable with back and front edges already as well as with flat curves. I haven’t tried using rope tow though.

Now I’m waiting eagerly for my upcoming trip to Carpathians to continue to master snowboard!

Hurray! I’ve managed to save a couple of bucks and finally bought a snowboard. This is whole Burton set — Burton Dominant 156 (2007/08) with Mission bindings and Ruler boots. Now I have nothing to do except to wait patiently until winter comes.