Okay, finally an actual composed and reasonably considered post, rather than random snippets of news and crap. Although there is some more news coming shortly…and its not crap… I know The Search is all mountain bikes but the fact is these days I put the bike down when the snow arrives and wax up the snowboards! So although Mcknight & Aston are in the UK and Spain respectively getting their pre-season bike time in, I’m snowboarding pretty much everyday and finding it hard to get excited about my bike! People are out digging trails or doing long XC rides in the dark and I’m feeling a bit like I’m not earning my place in the lift line come summer! So here is a post about the winter:
Winter is here in a big way at the moment, after a couple of on/off seasons snow-wise we’ve finally got a good one on the go here in France, loads of snow and good spells of clear weather afterwards. So with such good conditions its fair to say that you have to up your game! The old excuses like: “I’d do that with a bit more snow on the landing…” just don’t cut it anymore, you have to man up and live up to all the talk! For such simple pieces of equipment it constantly amazes me what it is possible to do on a snowboard/skis, how fast you can go, how far you can jump, how high you can drop….
This got me thinking a bit because I’ve started to do things on my snowboard this season that I thought were so far off in terms of my ability/balls that I wondered if it was more to do with the good conditions or the groundwork that I’ve put in over the past seasons when the snow wasn’t as good? Probably both but what about approaching winter from the perspective of a mountain biker? I’ve been riding bikes a lot longer than I’ve been snowboarding …
Late winter season or early summer season?
Coming from a mountain bike background has its advantages when it comes to winter sports. Obviously the parallels between skiing and DH have come up before but what I’ve noticed is the attitude nearly all the DH’ers have had when they have a go at skiing/snowboarding. A few mates from MTB have stayed on for winter seasons or come out on holiday and they’ve clicked straight into their boots and are nipping around the mountain in no time compared to others who don’t ride. Many evenings were spent discussing whether you use the same techniques/movements/parts of the brain to riding a bike? Maybe we’re just used to the sensation of speed and already have the sharp reactions needed from riding rough trails? But in the end the answer was much simpler. The ground is softer.
Paul Aston on Pleney not on ski's
The learning curve for skiing/snowboarding is much shorter than for DH riding. We all know it takes a good few years for the average rider to start getting good at riding a bike, while the average pleb who doesn’t really do any sport normally can get up and about in a week of skiing and they‘re normally necking half a bottle of wine with their lunch…. Just imagine how much quicker you’d pick up the DH skills if rocks and dirt didn’t cut you to ribbons every time you made a mistake! Or imagine the insane joy of crashing a snowboard off a 5 meter drop like I did today, landing on my face and the only thing that bothered me was some snow down my neck!
Snows brilliant stuff and we need more of it in downhill.
The Search Blog 