Listening to Major Tom while watching this incredible snowboarding video is pretty awesome. I remember being an adolescent and wanting to learn how to snowboard so bad that I went out, bought the board, bought the gear, and was super-psyched to start heading down the slopes the moment I’d learned how to do it. What I learned was that these awesome moves and the skill level I wanted to be at took more than looking cool and just wanting to do it. Some people are born to be natural athletes and tend to pick things up quickly while others have to work at it for years and years in order to get to the level you see in the clip.
I’ve ridden down a few slopes in my time but my trip was usually a lot tamer than what’s shown in the clip and anytime I encountered powder it almost always brought me to a screeching halt that made it necessary for me to then dig my way out. Watching these snowboarders in the clip making their way through deeper powder in the forests of Japan is something incredible. I can only imagine how fast some of them are going and what might happen if they smacked into or even clipped a tree in passing. That’s not positive thinking of course but that’s how my mind tends to work.
The thrill of snowboarding is a big part of why some people do it, but if you can get good enough then there’s a chance you could actually make some money at it in competition. Just like anything else if a thing like this can be marketed, which it has been for many years now, it will be taken to levels that the creator of the sport and the pioneers that made it great might never have realized were possible. The awesome tricks and techniques that are used on the snowboard are so impressive that to many it might look like a thing of ease. The moment you strap into a board though, that’s when the confidence test really begins.
If you can keep your balance and shift your hips the way you need to then you might be fine. But if you have no sense of balance or can’t seem to coordinate your movements with one another then you probably shouldn’t be up on the slopes. Snowboarding has been said to be harder to learn than skiing but easier to master, while skiing is easier to learn but harder to master. It also goes without saying that there has been a lot of enmity between snowboarders and skiers over the years, but for the most part these old stereotypes are being set to rest. It used to be that skiers and snowboarders could barely coexist if they did at all, but now that each group has become more educated about one another and the lines have been blurred since more and more people have switched sides it’s easier to see that both boarders and skiers tend to show respect while on the mountain.
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