Fabulous Fun... Snowboarding for Women (or men!) Why don’t more women over
age of 30 take up snowboarding? It is Fabulous Fun! Perhaps you haven’t tried it because you have heard that you will fall down a lot when learning. True. But it is possible to learn without pain. Pain and injury avoidance techniques for snowboarding are invaluable but not well known. If you know how, you can avoid two biggest mistakes that first time snowboarders make. A positive experience your first few times out will make you more likely to stick out hard times until you learn enough to really have fun!“There’s no reason that adults shouldn’t snowboard and have as much fun as kids” says self-proclaimed Snowboard Evangelist Lauren Traub Teton who admits to being “in her 40s”. “I have been riding a snowboard for four years, and am having most fun of my life!”
She feels that only thing stopping “oldsters” (in their mid-30s and up) from embracing snowboarding in a big way are inevitable hard falls experienced during short steep learning curve. She says “there are easy ways to avoid pain. They are just not well known.”
The reason “snowboard pain avoidance” is not more widely discussed has to do with history of snowboarding. To some snowboarders, pain and injury are cool. This is obvious if you read hundreds of war stories on snowboard websites.
This viewpoint has its roots in fact that snowboarding is stylistically a descendant of skateboarding and embraces some of same traditions. For example, doing a grab, where rider reaches down and grabs board while airborne, is more of a necessity in skating than in snowboarding, because skateboard is not attached to feet. But grabs have morphed into a popular trick and a way to show style in snowboarding too.
The other tradition that has carried over from skating is tradition of pain. In skateboarding, injury from accidental impact with hard ground is a common occurrence and gives a skater bragging rights (as well as bruises and breaks.). A lot of skaters are also snowboarders, and so tradition of absorbing pain as part of “paying dues” remains.
