Grays On Trays

Yesterday I took part in another NASTAR day. It was a good illustration of the law of demand, which says that for most goods and services, demand goes up as price goes down.

I’ve raced a total of four days this season. Here’s the number of racers who participated on the same day as me, prior to yesterday: 39, 20, 21.

How many people raced yesterday? 50.

What was different about yesterday that made racing so much more attractive? I don’t think it was overall turnout. My eyeballing-the-parking-lots estimate tells me that there were fewer customers yesterday than most other days I have visited this season.

The warm weather was one factor. You’re not going to hurt as much if you wipe out on softer snow, and that fact may have attracted some extra customers. And the resort personnel did their part by handing out flyers at the main chalet. They normally don’t do that.

But here’s what may have been the most important reason: the registration fee was on sale.

Normally, you have to pay $5 for three runs. Yesterday, if you wanted to race, you paid $0.00. I suspect the freebie attracted a number of first-time racers.

This season I’ve spent some time on NASTAR. It’s a race program that uses a handicap system and age brackets. It is dominated by skiers (after all, the program was started by Ski magazine), but snowboarders can participate.

Here are the sex and age distributions of snowboarding NASTAR participants, according to the latest rankings.

Men:
40 to 44: 133
45 to 49: 122
50 to 54: 56
55 to 59: 34
60 to 64: 18
65 to 69: 8
70 to 74: 2
Total men: 240
Males, all ages:

Women
40 to 44: 36
45 to 49: 24
50 to 54: 10
55 to 59: 9
60 to 64: 3
65 to 69: 1
Total women: 83

Men, all age groups: 2,624
Women, all age groups: 652

That’s a total of 323 snowboarders age 40 and up who have participated in NASTAR–a statistical footnote in the large scope of NASTAR. On the other hand, they make up more than half (56 percent) of all snowboarding participants in NASTAR.

My own ranking in this universe is fairly poor, at about the 30th percentile for all males as well as for my own age group.

On the other hand, if you look at men in my age group who ride in a soft-boot setup and ride duck, then I might be in line for some sort of prize.

Ah, the various ways to slice the universe to stroke the ego.

In high school, I got really good grades, graduating in the top 5 in a class of about 350. But I had a math teacher who liked to help his students keep from getting cocky. “You’re big fish in a little pond,” he would occasionally remind the students of his advanced classes, some of whom would then go off to be small students in the big ponds such as the University of Michigan.

I thought of Mr. Bernadini today when I pulled a glossy brochure from NASTAR out of my mailbox.

“YOU QUALIFIED!,” reads the top of the brochure. “CONGRATULATIONS” runs down the side.

Me? Apparently so.

The inside of the brochure explains: Congratulations! You qualified for the 2009 Nature Valley NASTAR National Championships! You ranked in the top 3 in your age & gender category in your division at a participating Nature Valley NASTAR resort as of February 16, 2009.

I’m honored, I guess. But it all reminds me of one-year career as coronet player. I was third chair. Out of three students. Sometimes I was second chair, though–when the other kid didn’t show up.

Nationally, I haven’t done so hot: Right now, I’m 97 out of over 115 in my class, nationally, and certainly below the 50th percentile of all men who race on snowboards. A country salesman I once knew said that he “was in the half of my graduating class that made the top half possible.” I feel the same way about my place in the racing world.

Is it in fact true that I’m in the top three of my ski area only because there aren’t four men of my age on a board? Perhaps. I do know that a fellow I’ve shared with the course with is in fact national caliber when it comes to running GS gates on a board. Then again, he has an alpine setup with binding angles that are about 3 degrees each, hard boots, a carving board built for speed–and lots of practice and perhaps little fear.

But I’ve qualified anyway. Will I go to Steamboat Springs and partake? I’d like to get there sometime, but it probably won’t happen this year. Besides, I hear that it’s really the place to ride in the trees.

Each year I participate in a meeting of people who write about skiing and snowboarding. Since nearly everyone in the group is a skier, our group activity is to run a NASTAR course. We split into teams of 10, and the top 3 scores of each team are used to determine the winning team.

In a NASTAR race, you typically race past and through the kinds of gates that they use on a GS (grand slalom) ski race. Those are the kinds with two poles placed close together, joined by a flag.

The races are handicapped for age (older = a higher handicap). You also get a handicap for being blind, using adaptive equipment, or … being on a snowboard.

Two years ago, at my first such meeting, one rather enthusiastic and persuasive member of the organization cajoled me into participating. “John, you’ve got to try it out. Besides, you get an extra handicap for being on a snowboard.” So I tried it out, taking two runs, just like everyone else. I think I fell (not badly) one time but not the other. My extra handicap help didn’t amount to much, as I was near the bottom of the pack (perhaps AT the bottom!) of our team’s scores.

Last year I tried the course again, and enjoyed it. In March, I’ve got another meeting coming up, so I thought it worthwhile to get in some practice runs before then. It couldn’t hurt, could it?

Actually, it could, if I slammed into one of the gates. Fortunately, I’ve never done that, and I took a few runs the other day and came away unscathed.

But it wasn’t pretty. I had a DNF the first trip, since I took a bad line and ended up downhill from a gate I was supposed to pass. I suppose I could have continued down the course just to get some practice with the other gates, but I had two more tries so I rode off.

I started out the second attempt fairly aggressively (well, aggressively for me) and ended up biffing while making a turn. Though I fell down on my butt, I stood up and was able to properly navigate the next gate.

At that point I took a break, and then returned for more. I was more cautious on the third trip, as far as speed, but tried, more than the other two times, to stay in the lines created by the skiers. That was probably a mistake, given how I was riding. I was on the verge of losing control several times, and had to slow way down to stay up.

I got to the bottom of the hill, where someone in the race house announces your score. I’ve always had trouble hearing my scores, and this time I heard “gold medal.” I figured there was no way that I earned a medal. I checked the NASTAR site later that day, and sure enough–no medal. So the announcer probably said something like “5 seconds behind a gold medal.”

I’m thinking through what I need to do next time out, and hope to try again at least one other day before the meeting. I don’t expect to “win,” but hope to do better.

Yesterday I explained how I got in a NASTAR race on a snowboard. But how did it go?

At the base of the mountain I had to ask where the NASTAR event was. “Take the Red Lady lift, and go off to your right,” I was told. I did, and as I got to the area, called “Smith Hill,” I certainly felt a little unusual.

The course itself was fenced off on either side, and the starting area was enclosed as well. A queue of fellow snowsports journalists, about 18 or so, were lined up just outside the area, waiting for their turn.

A snowboard is a great device for sliding down a mountain, but it’s not so great for staying in one place. People were queued up not in a flat area but on a slope. I could stand in one heel side or toe side. Standing heel side for a prolonged time is difficult, but really, standing in line in either stance was difficult, since my board would have to be perpendicular to everyone else’s skis.

I released the binding on my back soot, and awkwardly descended to the waiting area, step by step. Sometimes the board would slip out from under me, and I had to work to get it back under my control.

In time I got to the starting gate. There were two starting gates, side by side. Skiers have no difficulty getting into position. On a snowboard, you may, as I did, have to get both bindings set at the gate. Fortunately it wasn’t the case that you just slide up to the gate and go in the next instant.

The starter asked the name of the skier at the adjacent gate, and yelled that out to the record keeper. Then she did the same for me. During this time I was able to secure my back-foot-binding, and move myself into position. I would start out passing through two low posts, and I grabbed both of those to hold myself in place until the starter told us to go.

The courses are fairly close, and I certainly did not want to take out any skier. One, that would hurt. Two, that would harm skier-snowboarder relations, and I felt like I had to be on my best behavior. Given these concerns, I planned to leave the gate slowly, to give the skier time to get down the course before I did. Not that this was necessary; I would have lagged almost anyone in the event.

I had never participated in such an event, so I had no idea how closely spaced the gates would be. That played well into the “take it slow” plan; I took my time in figuring things out.

The first three gates were fairly closely spaced, so I was careful to make it past each one. No use getting disqualified so early. As my run was in the first hour of the event (and of the day), the course was in pretty good shape, or so I thought. Not too scraped off, not too icy, not too rutted.

After a few gates, the course opened up a bit, with the gates getting further apart. It was easier to navigate them, so I could go faster. “Just make each gate,” I kept thinking. “No need to be a hero.” That opportunity was long gone, of course, as was the skier on the other course.

When I got towards the end, I lost some speed. Bummer! And on the flat, too!

Having lived through that, I thought that it was time to take another shot. After all, it was a best-of-two format.

As I rode off to the bottom of the mountain to catch the next lift (you’re thinking I was going to walk back up?), I felt pretty good about the event. No harm, no foul. No missed gates, no hit gates. I had no idea what my score was, however. For some reason–maybe it was just too high to say publicly?–there was no announcement on the loudspeakers. No mind, I made it through.

For the second run, I thought “Time to take it faster. I know how the gates are spaced, I did fine before, now use some speed.”

The second run required the adjacent course. I thought that I ran faster, and sure enough, I did, though only by a second, or less. As I came to the finish line, I realized that I was again slowing down, not carrying my speed, and that I had forgotten many of the little mind tricks that I have
for speeding up my riding.

No use for that then, however. We each got two shots, and I had used mine up. It wasn’t a bad start, though. I certainly don’t have a racing setup. I’ve got an all-mountain freeride board, and I use a duck stance, for starters. But I’m willing to give it a try again next season.

A snowboarder on a ski racing course? Yep.

One common feature of the annual meeting of the National Association of Snowsports Journalists Association (NASJA) is a NASTAR event. NASTAR, which stands for the National Standards Race, is a means by which skiers (and participants are largely skiers) can assess their abilities to race.

The operations of NASTAR are all fairly complicated (see the Rules/Info page for more), but roughly speaking, an Olympic ski racer is timed on a course, and everyone else’s score is referenced against his time.

There are also adjustments for a racer’s sex and age, resulting, as in golf, in a handicap. Unlike a trip through a NASCAR course, which runs for hours, the trip down a NASTAR course will take 30 seconds. And that’s if you’re very slow. If you participate in NASTAR on a regular basis, you can track your progress over time, as the handicapping system allows you to compare your racing on Mount X in one year with your racing on Mount Y in the next year.

Each person at the annual meeting was given the opportunity to sign up for the race the day before. We were to be assigned to teams of 10 or so, which added another dimension to the event. Not only was each participant going to be stacked up with his prior performance (or in my case, setting a benchmark for future events), he would also be contributing to a team effort.

I had not thought of participating. After all, I have always thought of racing as a “ski thing.” Skiers race. Snowboarders, if they do something other than cruise, hit the terrain park or the halfpipe.

But I got talked into it. One, the organizer of the event is someone I know, a person whose enthusiasm is infectious. Two, this trip was all about learning, doing new things, and exploring the broader world of snow sports. A timed race fit right in.

I had three objectives going into the event: don’t get hurt, don’t fall, and don’t miss any gates. Happily, I met all three objectives.

More on that later.