I managed to get out one short screeching yell before I fell-hard.
That pretty much sums up my first experience snowboarding … or attempting to. Thankfully, my private two-hour lesson and nearly full day on the slopes in nearby North Carolina didn’t leave me with any broken bones (although check back with me about my wrist and shoulder). But they also didn’t yield me the ability to stay up on the board for very long before falling, again and again.
If you aren’t falling, you aren’t trying,” my instructor, Geoff Griffiths, told me after I seriously began to question my abilities, which included being able to walk properly once unstrapped from the board. But apparently I was par for the course when it comes to learning to snowboard. That first day is typically pretty much all about falling.
“Skiing is easy to learn but hard to master. Snowboarding is [really!] hard to learn but easy to master,” everyone at Beech Mountain Resort told me. Apparently it takes about a full day to master the most basic of snowboarding basics, though I didn’t make it quite that far. I did, however, manage a few runs down the bunny slope that didn’t end (and start again … and again) with falling.
Stopping, changing directions, finally getting going (really fast!) once up on the board-it all ended with me falling. But my brief time maneuvering the board in between my dozens of falls yielded some perspective on what my instructor had been trying to impart, and the bunny slope offered the distance I needed to almost put it all into practice. Things finally began clicking into place by the end of the day. Until I had to go “toe side.” Then I just fell again.