Grays On Trays

Some people take lessons, while others try it out on their own. How about you?

Feel free to leave a comment.

Sugar Bowl, a resort in the Lake Tahoe area, is offering a “Senior’s All Mountain Alpine Ski Adventure.” The camp, which comes in two-day and three-day versions, offers three hours of coaching and three hours of instruction each day. Video analysis is also available.

Despite the use of the word “ski,” snowboarders are welcome to join. The site doesn’t say whether snowboarders will be grouped together but with their own instructors, or whether they will have parallel sessions.

For a few seasons–two or three, I forget which–I taught snowboarding. I’m not doing it now, but I was talking with a friend about it, and that conversation reminded me of the benefits of teaching.

Instructors get a free season pass and some pay, though where I taught, the hourly rate was comparable to stocking shelves at a store, and since you got paid only if you actually had a lesson, the pay was lower. Still, there are a lot of benefits to being an instructor:

(a) The clinics they give to instructors are a great way to hone your own technique;

(b) Think you know how to do something? Then try to teach it to someone else. That helps you nail it;

(c) You get a great satisfaction seeing someone gain skills and confidence–one woman I taught, about 50 years old, told me she could now cross an item off her bucket list. Hearing that made my week (the $20 tip was a bonus);

(d) You get some camaraderie by being part of a team of instructors;

(e) You get discounts on gear from various shops;

(f) It helps compensate for the times that you get bored by the terrain. Here in the Midwest our descents are 300 feet, not 2,000 feet;

I’m sure there are some other benefits, but those are the ones that quickly came to mind.

The season still hasn’t started in most places. If you’re at all interested, ask your favorite ski area if they’re having a clinic for new instructors. It will probably be spread over several days, after which you may be selected. You may have to pay for the experience, but it will be a good education.

Jesus said “unless you are converted and become as little children, you will by no means enter the kingdom of heaven” (Matthew 18:3). Some people might say that snowboarding is heavenly, and there are certainly some comparisons between learning to ride and being like a toddler.

First, consider the act of getting to stand up when your feet are locked into the bindings. It’s awkward, isn’t it? It reminds me of the difficulty that a toddler faces when learning how to stand up from a seated position.

Next, consider the joy of discovery. Toddlers are natural scientists, exploring everything they see, and often taking great joy in finding something new. One activity that makes a toddler happy is learning how to use a slide. There’s a “whee” factor in making the trip down the slide. Like snowboarding, it involves gravity, sliding, fun, and a bit of fear.

Any other ideas? I’ll be adding them as I think of them–or add your own observations in the comments section.

If you want to see some videos giving you tips on snowboarding, there are plenty out there. Most, however, are of freestyle tricks. They also tend to have what is, to my ears at least, an unbearable soundtrack.

But what if you’re interested in finding some videos that give you some help in the basics of snowboarding? Finally, some are available. You can find out more about them in the newly revised videos page of the Grays on Trays^® site.

Say you’re with some people who are just starting out in snowboarding, they need some time to practice on easy slopes, and you want to hang out with them. What can you do to make the time more interesting if you’re a more advanced rider?

Here are some things that you can do to make a slope that might be so as to be uninteresting more challenging:

Keep one foot out.
Ride down the hill with only your front foot in the binding. This reinforces the idea that your front foot should be doing the steering. You should find it difficult. If you find it extremely difficult, it may mean that you’re kicking out your back foot to make turns—a move that will make for skidded turns.

Make your turns smaller and smaller.
Start out by using the lift towers as objects to slalom around. Then move to somewhere else on the slope and start making your turns successively shorter so that you’re nearly going with the fall line. (Start out saying “1, 2, 3, 4, turn,” and then “1, 2, 3, turn.”) Be careful to time when do this, as it will mean that you’ll reach the chair much sooner than your friends who are beginners.

Practice filming other people.
Keeping your eye on a moving target while you are moving yourself is a challenge!

Point your board in the other direction.
Your board has a tip, which is first part of the board to start a turn, and a tail, which is the last. Don’t do anything different with your bindings, but start looking towards the tail of your board as you slide, so that it, not the tip, leads you down the hill. This will be a challenge for many people. If you have a directional board, you’ll have the extra challenging of having a smaller turning radius.

Flip your bindings 180 degrees from where they are now.
Keep using the tip of the board to lead you down the hill. But take your bindings off the board and flip them around so that your toes will point in the opposite direction (along the length of the board) of what they’re used to. Like the previous activity, this means that you’ll have a different lead foot than what you’re used to. It’s just a bit more complicated in that you’ve got to go to the trouble of remounting your bindings.

If you ride a symmetrical twin-tip board and use a stance of zero-zero degrees, there’s no distinction between these two “tricks.” Otherwise, the differences between the two can range from subtle to dramatic, depending on the sidecut of the board, binding angles, and how far the bindings are set from the tip of the board.

Get small.
Ride on an ultra-short snowboard, such as the Rossignol Mini. It will give you a different feel than your regular board, and make it easier to perform some of the other items on this list.

Spin.
There are lots of spins, including those down by riders who launch themselves into the air and make two or three complete revolutions, five or fifteen feet in the air. You’re not interest in that? That’s OK; few older folks will be. Keep it on the ground and you’ll have enough of a challenge. As you go into a turn, keep turning so that you make a complete revolution. Once you get that down, string several spins together. You’ll probably find that it’s easier to do this by looking into the spin (frontside spin) or backing into the spin (backside spin). Perfect one and then try the other.

A new way off the lift.
Ride off the lift with your “open” binding leading the way. This will make getting off the chair lift more interesting.

Do movement analysis.
That’s the technical term for watching other people on the hill, observing what they are doing, and deciphering how what they do with their knees, ankles, shoulders, etc. affects their riding. You can pick up some good “Don’t do that” tips this way. For example, if a man has his arms spread wide and in front of him, like an outrigger, what does that tell you?

Teach your friends, if you have training to do so.
During a couple of seasons I taught through a ski school. On occasions I teach friends free of charge. But teaching is more difficult than it first appears. Make sure you have proper training, or you could help your friends develop bad habits.

Naturally, you should attempt any of these only if you have adequate space and customer traffic allows. Remember the responsibility code.

Still looking for Christmas gifts? If you know someone who is interested in taking up snowboarding, check out the video Fresh Start Snowboarding.

There are few good instructional snowboard videos out there, and this one has its limits, too. But if you can learn a few things about snowboarding from the comfort of your home or office, why not?

If there’s one thing as enjoyable as a great day of snowboarding, it’s seeing someone else learn how to ride. That is doubly so if that “someone else” is your child.

So what’s the appropriate age for a child to learn how to ride? Snowboard columnist Gavin Ehringer provides some answers.

When are your kids ready for snowboarding? Most ski and snowboard schools limit snowboarding participation to children at least 6 years old, while many will allow kids to take part in skiing as young as age 3. Beaver Creek doesn’t offer group snowboarding lessons for kids under age 7.

The reason: Snowboarding requires more lower-body strength, balance and coordination than skiing.

He (sensibly) advises that most parents should let the professionals give the lessons. (Source: “Leave it to Beaver Creek for lessons,” Rocky Mountain News, March 25, 2008)

At the beginning of the season it’s once again appropriate to bring out a familiar reminder: Friends don’t teach friends how to go snowboarding.

Not that learning how to ride is a bad thing. Far from it. And hanging out with your friends on the mountain is good, too.

But if you know how to ride and your friend doesn’t, it may not be the best thing if you try to teach your friend how to ride. It could be much better for your friendship–and your friend’s riding future–if you instead encourage your friend to take some lessons.

The Rocky Mountain News reminds us why this is the case. One, you’re probably going to teach your friend some bad habits. Two, it may strain your friendship, since the teacher/student dynamic is very different from the friend/friend one. (And worse, don’t teach your spouse or significant other!) Another reason for leaving the teaching to someone else is that there’s a benefit to specialization. A snowboard instructor has a lot more experience than you do in teaching people how to ride–which means that he or she has the tools to help your friend avoid nasty slams and wipeouts. You probably don’t.

Now all this is general information and you’ve got to apply it to your own situation. If you’re already an instructor yourself, you may be just fine teaching a friend. (I taught a close relative of mine two years ago and things worked out fine.)

Of course not all instructors are equally competent. It might help to ask for an instructor with AASI certification, though I know from experience that’s not a guarantee that everything will go swimmingly. But whatever you do, think twice before trying to teach a friend.

This weekend some members of the extended family came to town from a state where they don’t get much snow. Parents, grandparents, and little kids enjoyed some time at a sledding hill. We had saucers, a Flexible Flyer, and one rectangular (and slow!) sled.

Though the hill had a mere 35 (or was it 50?) vertical rise, walking up it made me appreciate modern technology. As I told a few people: “God made snow; man made lifts.”

But of course I had to take my snowboard, too. It made me think of the old-school snowboarders, who had to hike everywhere they went. I didn’t have nearly as many trips down as I would have had even with a rope tow, and it was a lot more work. But then again, it was a different experience, and had its own joys. So old school.

This afternoon I introduced another member of the family to snowboarding. His young son made jokes about how his dad was going to “get killed,” but the old man did very well. I knew our time was limited, so I gave him an abbreviated lesson that was short on some elementary skills (skating, sliding with one foot in) and long on just riding down the hill. He started working on the j-turns fairly well, especially on the toeside. I could see the usefulness of his ski background as he talked about the pros and cons of going down the slope in one particular direction.

As I said, it was a short session, and we soon returned to helping the kids hurl themselves down the short hill in plastic sleds. My family member / student may in time take a lesson when there’s more terrain (e.g., Colorado). It would be great to see the little lesson of today result in another adult snowboarder, and riding companion.