Surviving Snowboarding

This blog post comes to you from Highway 99 heading toward Vancouver on a bright, sunny, beautifully warm day in Canada. The mountains are covered in trees and snow, and clouds obscure the tops.

That’s right, I said mountains. For a girl from Illinois, they just never get old.

Speaking of mountains, a bunch of us went up to one of the local ones, Mt. Seymour, on Monday evening to snowboard. Monday nights are Ladies’ Nights, which means each of us girls gets in for only a $5 donation to the BC Cancer Foundation. Brij gave me his brother’s gear to use – a few pairs of socks later and even the boots fit pretty well – so we didn’t have to rent me anything.

See the mountains in the back?

Getting closer...

Snow + fog = almost there.....

Long story short, I choose to gauge the success of the evening not by how flawlessly I was able to ride down the cute little “bunny hill,” but rather by how many fewer times I fell on the last run as compared to the first. Going by that criterion, I’m pretty satisfied. I suppose it wasn’t too bad for someone who’s never snowboarded or skied in her life. I did whack my head on the ground pretty hard the first few times I fell (yes, I had a helmet), but after that it was my glutes and wrists that took the worst of it.

I think I rode down that hill about 6 or 7 times in the 4ish hours we were on the mountain, including the first two where Brij was giving me a crash course – rather literally – in snowboarding. By the end of the evening I was able to make it almost to the bottom without wiping out, instead of every few feet the whole way down. A considerable improvement, if I do say so myself. I would have gone down one more time but my muscles were completely wrecked and there was no way it was going to happen.

The next day, yesterday, was spent almost entirely lounging at home recovering. Everyone in our party had sustained some kind of injury and I, being a complete noob, was really hurting all over. It was so bad I couldn’t even sit up from lying on my back because my neck was sooooo sore; I had to roll over and push myself up with my hands. Today I woke up feeling considerably better. I’m not sure if it was the rest or the fact that I broke down and took a couple of Extra Strength Tylenols, but I feel like I’m on the way to recovery.

This morning, the sun was shining and the wind had died down, so we decided to head into Vancouver for a day in the city. So here we are, driving up the highway. Stories and photos to follow.