Day 6: Working on Posture
Well, I had more life drama than I could handle so I ended up running away to the beaches of Mexico for a little while. Thus, I fell behind on my early season boarding. I’m back in Colorado and back on the slopes. I went up to A-Basin today and got some runs in before it got crowded; and my gosh did it get crowded. I got hit so hard by a skier that he actually lifted me up off the ground. He tried to blame me until ski patrol - having seen the whole thing - came up and set him straight. Skiers…
Anyway, I’ve been working extremely hard on improving my posture lately. I work in front of a computer much of the day and I’ve developed rather poor posture. I have a massage therapist helping to open up my chest. The personal trainer I was seeing gave me a lot of tips on improving my posture. I’m sitting on a yoga ball at work much of the day. I’m also pushing my shoulders back, to an exaggerated extent, whenever I think about it. When your shoulders go back and your spine goes up, your toes tend to come together. Today was proof that I’m improving because I had to adjust my bindings and bring my toes in a little bit. Sweet!
The need to work on my posture really hit home when I watched the Pucon video and saw how far over I was leaning. The way I figure it, your equilibrium is designed to work when your head is on straight. With my head tipped over and rotated, I’m not using my sense of balance to it’s fullest. I noticed other riders around me on tough terrain had considerably better posture. Today, I tried riding with my head up straight and shoulders back a bit. In Mexico, I did a little wind surfing. The guy who taught me spoke nearly no Spanish, but he kept showing me proper posture - which was almost a lean backwards keeping your arms straight. This made me use my hips more for balancing, so I also applied this today. All together, I was a little shaky because it felt new and different; however it seemed to feel a lot more correct. I think this will help my riding and I encourage other riders to try different postures.
I snapped a photo of the newly serviced Montezuma Bowl. It’s 400 acres added to Arapahoe Basin this year - the largest expansion in North America that almost doubles the size of the park. There’s only one lift servicing the area. There’s more ridable area past the bottom of the lift, but if you take it - you have to hike back up.
So that’s 6 days down and 94 left to go. Unfortunately, the snow hasn’t been the best lately and it looks to be a dry Thanksgiving. You never can tell, so here’s hoping.
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November 25th, 2007 at 7:28 pm
[...] is over 13,000 feet and I live around 5,000. For a while I was worried it had something to do with hitting my head two weeks ago. Who knows, maybe I’ll die from a bleeding brain soon. Regardless of this [...]