A month ago I went snowboarding for the very first time.
I started big and I started small.
I Started Big
About a year in advance my friends and I talked about doing a snowboard trip together. We kept the idea going. We kept checking in with each other to make sure it was still something we all wanted to do. Then came checking dates. Checking with spouses. Scoping out locations online.
Then in the fall, finally the jump of buying plane tickets, setting up the van rental, finding the AirBNB, choosing a ski area, buying lift tickets, putting gear together.
And after all that, then came the actual day of going to the airport, security, hours on a plane, ginger ale, landing, baggage claim, rental desk, an hour drive to the AirBNB…thirty more minutes to the ski area…two more hours in the rental line because a couple of us didn’t bring everything we needed.
Just getting to the base of the mountain was a huge breathtaking victory, like we’d overcome the insurmountable odds, like we’d beaten Vegas ala Oceans 11.
I was now ready for…snowboard school.
I Started Small
I kid you not, the first line of snowboard school was “This is called a snowboard.”
Very funny I know. But honestly that was the appropriate place to start.
We spent the first several hours not on a bunny hill, but on the most subtle gradual incline in all of Colorado. I don’t think a marble would have even rolled on that, my first slope.
And that’s not to belittle the process. It was hard. I fell. A lot…yes on the most subtle gradual incline in all of Colorado.
By the afternoon we’d graduated to practicing our newly learned basic techniques on sections of the actual bunny hill. Not the whole bunny hill, just sections. Hours of more falling, getting it, falling a bit harder, getting it again, and so on.
But just before the end of a very long first day I felt it. The feeling. The snowboard feeling. Connecting a few turns and dare I say, cruising. That was the magic. I knew what I was doing just enough to have a little fun and to know how to do it again.
It took starting big in order to start small. Both sized efforts were necessary, in that order.
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Drop me an email: gabe@gabethebassplayer.com