"Baka Dasai" wrote in message
news:slrnc0nabe.4pl.idontreadthis@yahoobb220004112 021.bbtec.net...

Yeah, this is a pretty common experience at rental shops. I see many
people in rental gear that is so low quality and/or poor fitting that
I know they're gonna struggle to learn to turn.

You can get better results if you don't mind making the rental
dude/dudette muck about giving you various different boot sizes, and
adjusting your bindings for preferred stance angle etc. But
first-time beginners don't usually know what they want, and are often
intimidated by the whole experience.

Right. I didn't really know what we wanted, except that I wanted it to work.
But there really isn't much that the clerks can do for one person, because
they always have to worry about the long line of people waiting for service.

I don't know if the instructor was doing a good job or not, but what
you've described sounds fairly common to me. Your first time out on
the slope involves lots of falling over and very little control.
It's a steep learning curve, by which I mean it seems impossibly
daunting at first, but after about two days (often earlier) some
basic skills "click" and you're off to explore the rest of the
mountain.

Perhaps you're shaking your head while reading this, firm in the
belief that you'll never be able to learn to snowboard, but unless
you're spectacularly uncoordinated you'll pick it up quicker than you
think.

The skills seemed to be hard to learn, but that wasn't the real problem. The
problem was that the environment -- the particular equipment we had been
issued, which was OK by rental standards but not quite right, the
instructor's rote procedures, and most of all the impossibly crowded
beginners' hill -- made learning impossible, at least for me. I just refuse
to do anything that risks smacking into other people.

I suppose my first day of ice skating (also as an adult) was worse, because
my finger got run over by a skate blade, I bled all over the ice and had to
go the emergency room for stitches. I persevered, however, because I could
tell, even from the first day, that I would eventually be able to learn the
activity. I could hold the wall when I needed to, and when I fell on open
ice, I was falling while actually skating, not while I was just learning to
stand up. Buying my own equipment was easy to manage because a pair of good
skates is a lot less than a board, boots and bindings. And a key factor was
that we did a lot of skating indoors in the summer, when the rinks were
usually empty or close to it. It's great to learn with a big open spaces at
your disposal. I wish there were a snowboarding equivalent.

Thanks,

Joe Ramirez