Days 28 and 29: My First 180
I just had a fantastic weekend. One of my first snowboarding buddies, Russ, flew up from Austin for the weekend. Tina and Laura (from here in Denver) came out to Dillon with us and we stayed with Jay and Jayne. Tina and Laura rode with Russ and I all day Saturday at Keystone. We rode tree runs, moguls, fast flats, and spent some time in the park. Everyone had a blast. Kudos to Tina for enduring the knee bust on the park box.
So, today (Sunday), Russ and I rode together at Keystone again. We spent the better part of the day just playing in the park. Russ also finally had a chance to break out his $4,000 Sony DV cam. He shot some footage of me warming up on some runs and we caught a little bit of footage of each other playing in the park.
We were in a smaller terrain park playing on some rollers near the end of the day. Russ was clearing the jumps smoothly and tossing in some methods and a nose grab. I just wasn’t getting enough snap to clear the backside of the jumps. I was consistently landing just half a board length shy of the downside and was getting a bit frustrated.
On my last jump on film, I once again failed to completely clear the table top. Frustrated, I started carving to the right off of the upside of the next jump. I bailed off the lip and - without even thinking about it - hopped a 180. I landed switch clean with no shake or chatter.
This is a big deal to me! I’ve been *thinking* about a 180 for a while now. In fact, I thought about it on the way up the lift several times today; but I had no intention of trying one. Sure, I only had about a foot of vert, which is not a big deal… but I’ve never successfully landed a 180 - until today - making this my very first one. I was super stoked!.
71 days left…
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February 13th, 2008 at 9:47 am
Nice one mate!
So are you spinning frontside or backside?
What’s your mates camera like? I’m thinking about investing in something a little more expensive - $4000, it must be pretty tight?
February 13th, 2008 at 11:35 pm
[...] buddy Russ came up a little while back and we shot video on one of the days he was here. The above clip was his edit from the one day of [...]
February 24th, 2008 at 3:52 pm
Gavin - I’m spinning front side. His camera is fairly rock’n… High Def, awesome vibration reduction, excellent optics, miniDV recording… I’ll try to get the spec’s and send em your way…