iRide
Zaskoda’s Snowboarding Journal

I’m trapped in the airport in Austin. I came down for a mix of business and pleasure. I had a wonderful time; but my flight home was delayed by 4 hours due to mechanical failures. Way to go United! Ug!

One of the many highlights of my trip was a wakeboarding rail competition in the middle of town called The Grind. In addition to the main event, there was a wake skate compo and a skateboarding compo. Watching everyone play got my blood pumping. All I could think about was getting back on the mountain and riding.

On the up side of things, I have had a recent change in my career that will give me a small window of free time. Thus, I’m going to start hitting the mountain hard over the next couple of weeks. We’ll see how many days I can make up.

So, while watching the rail show, I was reminded of one down side of snowboarding. When we go surf the mountain, we typical wear a whole lot of gear. Other board sports like wakeboarding and surfing can be very different. Today I watched cute girls stroll by in string bikinis while I absorbed a fair amount of sun myself. It’s not just the eye candy, but a feeling of being comfortable and free. It’s a different state of mind. While I enjoy feeling like I’m wearing a suit of armor when I snowboard - I think I might prefer being comfortable wearing little more than a pair of trunks.

Maybe I’ll multipurpose my blog and spend a couple of years surfing and blogging about it. :)

I woke up to the radio announcing today as the “First Day of Spring” this morning. There was a commercial for A-Basin saying there are “at least two months of riding left”. Where did my winter go?! I believe I let myself get too distracted this season. If I quit my job and snowboarded every day, I would just barely make my 100 day goal. However, I would not be able to pay my bills. I would lose my truck and default on my apartment lease. Somehow, that doesn’t seem like a healthy option - as tempting as it is.

To be completely honest, there are many things I’m looking forward to this spring and summer. I want to go kayak, downhill mountain bike, outdoor rock climbing, hiking, camping, and all kinds of other fun outdoor stuff that Colorado offers. I sure am going to miss the snowboarding though.

I’ve got a few more days planned and I still have 10 days for Beaver Creek and Vail left on my pass. It would be a crime not to use them. Here’s hoping I have a good late season!

I was catching up on some reading and ran across this post on Afterbang. I was stoked to hear that Gavin’s blog was getting some attention. I flipped on over to Blogged and checked out the snowboarding blog section. I was stoked to see that iRide (this site) was ranked with an 8.3! I also nudged Gavin out by one spot! Ratings change so things may not stay that way for too long… But I thought I’d gloat while I could. Anyway, there are some of my usual reads up there; but several of the listings are entirely new to me. It looks like I have some exploring I can do!

After swapping a couple of emails with the sponsors behind the trip, I’ve learned that I misreported some information on day 34. The main sponsors were Tuaca, Red Bull & Intrawest. Sweet Leaf merely provided their yummy tea.

More specifically

• Intrawest provided lift tickets
• Tuaca sponsored the bus and swag
• Red Bull gave us wings
• Our awesome bus driver’s name is BJ

My buddy Adam came up from Dallas for what might be his last snowboard trip for a while. He’s got a baby on the way. I’ve never ridden with Adam, so I was intent on making sure I made it up to Copper mountain yesterday. It turned out to be a great day with lots of fresh snow. Copper had 5 fresh inches on the ground as we were driving up, and it continued to fall all day long.

It turned out to be one of the most abusive days of boarding I’ve had in a while. I’ve been riding the Arbor exclusively lately, and constantly adjusting my stance as I go. Because of the fresh powder and types of runs I thought we would be doing, I switched back to the longer Burton Custom for the day. I couldn’t seem to keep the board under me. I biffed it over and over. On my first run of the day, I splattered while trying to avoid a skier that cut me off while I was airborne. He apologized, but it didn’t do much to help the thumb I laid back in the process. Ouch. During our powder runs, I found myself constantly eating it. I couldn’t understand why. Knowing that I ate it on clean powder runs, you can imagine how much the bumps tore me up.

Later in the day, I examined my stance on the board. It was a lot different from how I’d been riding. I adjusted my bindings and it made a huge difference. It was a little too late, as I was already physically wiped out from crashing so much through the day.

I still had a ton of fun. We started things off on the moguls as we were riding with skiers. Then we dropped into the Enchanted Forest (holy crap, what an awesome run!). From there, we worked our way to one of the back bowls and spent most of the day. Near the end, we took some groomers down the front and hit the intermediate terrain park and a few tree runs in the process.

Due to a variety of factors, I was left without a ride home. I ended up hitching a ride at the top of the parking lot. The dude that picked me up was a local native named Luke. Turns out, he just started competing in slope style and used to compete in boarder cross. I’m hoping to get Russ back out here to shoot some video of this guy. Luke was kind enough to go out of his way and drop me off at my doorstep. Hell, he even helped me carry my gear up three flights of stairs - very nice guy.

Everything hurts today - it’s great. Legs, back, arms, neck, toe, thumb… it’s all trashed. I’ll be headed back out again tomorrow for day 36. It’s a special day, as it will be my base goal for the season. After tomorrow, I will have doubled my riding days since moving to Colorado last May. How cool is that? My next big milestone after tomorrow will be day 64 - which will give me a grand total of 100 days ever. And, of course, I’m still striving for the ultimate goal of 100 days this season. Wish me luck!

65 days left…

As mentioned before, I managed to smash the nose of my Burton Custom 162 on a rock. I took it in to Colorado Ski and Golf to see if I could get it fixed. This is the second major repair job I’ve made to the Custom - not counting filling gouges in the bottom sheet. The first repair I was able to make myself. I didn’t want to take this latest one on myself.

For $20, they did a really decent job of patching it up. He had to remove some of the metal and fill the gap in with epoxy. The ‘after’ part of the before/after photo attached was taken after a day of riding. I did manage to rough up the sensitive spot while riding. The original patch job was really clean looking. This photo shows that, even after abusing the nose of the board, all the layers are holding together nicely. I’m not sure how many more days I’ll get out of my Custom; but thanks to a job well done at the shop around the corner, it looks like I’ll get a few more.