Gravity and is cruel and unpredictable mistress

nospam@example.com (Matt Hughes) — Sun, 05 Mar 2006 11:57:18 -0500

The second time I went skiing to Sunshine, I took my camelback along so I could have some water without going to get my water bottle out of a locker. It worked pretty good, despite having no insulation on the tube, as long as I remembered to blow the water back into the reservoir. I decided that I was feeling confident enough that I could take my camera along and not seriously hurt myself or the camera, since I don't fall down as often or as hard anymore (pictures in the gallery).

So tempting gravity, as I was, I of course caught an edge and fell hard on my back. I didn't notice at the time, but the zipper on the water reservoir had popped open. I rode to the bottom of the run and leaned down to unstrap my bindings, and water poured out over my neck. Fortunately it didn't come inside my jacket, but I did get enough on my boots and pants that there were a few damp spots. The camera was also damp, but not soaked. The camera case seemed to have soaked up all the water, and the camera still works, fortunately.

When I was in Cuba last year, I tried out SCUBA diving at the resort, and then went on a trip to the Bay of Pigs. For Christmas this year my brother in law, who I dived with in Cuba, got a bunch of gift certificates to Adventures in SCUBA. We finally signed up for the PADI open water diver course, which started on last Monday. It is going pretty well, although the class is almost twice as large as normal. We got some pool time, where I found that I really need to work on my buoyancy control. Damn gravity. Four more weeks to go, then we'll have to find a time and place for the open water dives. Maybe when it warms up a bit.

The title is this post is courtesy of Jeremy Clarkson, in Top Gear's Winter Olympics special. It made me laugh.

More snowboarding!

nospam@example.com (Matt Hughes) — Sun, 29 Jan 2006 02:47:47 -0500

Went snowboarding again today at Fortress Mountain. There was less snow than last weekend, but the conditions were still pretty good. Unfortunately, Fortress has only one lift open right now, and all the runs off of it are black diamonds, unless you want to carry your board along the ridge to a blue run. It's been a bit of a trial by fire to learn to snowboard on black diamonds, although the green run I did over and over again at Sunshine gave me just as much trouble. For a different reason though.

Last week I rode a run with a lot of powder, over and over again, just practicing my turns. I stuck to the powder for the soft landings, since a couple of hard falls at Sunshine turned me off of groomed runs for practicing. I hadn't quite figured out my boots, so I spent quite a lot of time sitting around trying to get the feeling to come back in my toes and feet. Perhaps part of that was having brand new boots. I think I did about 4 runs last weekend... it was pretty dismal. I was able to improve a bit though. It wasn't only my feet holding me back... I spent a lot of time falling down and trying to get back up again. I did a few face plants; instant brain freeze! One of the guys I was with lent me some goggles, and that helped quite a bit, or maybe I just didn't do any more face plants.

This week I had almost no problem doing 7 or 8 runs in a row, before we stopped for lunch. After lunch we probably did 7 or 8 more. I think we were the last non-employees on the hill actually. I even kept up with Stephen, so he wasn't able to get two runs to my one in. The last two times he told me a lot of helpful stuff about balance and how to turn and so on, and drilled me even. TURN! TURN! TURN! It was like a 60's folk song. This time out, I knew I had to practice my turning. Particularly since the snow wasn't as powdery and less effort was required to twist the board around, so that balance and weight distribution played a bigger role. So I made some progress on that. We stuck to an interesting run under the chairlift, one with powder, little gullies, a bit of groomed. Playing in the gullies was fun, but I had a hard time turning from my back edge to my front edge. I finally figured out that it was because I was too far back on the board, and I wasn't leaning into the turn enough. It felt very strange to lean forward. More practice is required.

The green run I was working on at Sunshine gave me a lot of trouble because parts of it are quite long and not very steep. This meant that I tended to want to ride along flat on the board; the trouble is that little bumps in the snow can cause an edge to catch and an unpleasant fall. A couple of those convinced me that I needed a helmet, which has helped a lot. I still have to figure out how to handle that terrain, which is probably just a matter of keeping up on an edge at all times and move from edge to edge fairly quickly.

So far it's been a lot of fun learning to snowboard!

Anthology of Interest - Snowboarding

Gravity and is cruel and unpredictable mistress

More snowboarding!