This Sport a Real Kick in Pants

If you’re among those considering taking up snowboarding and are unfamiliar with the term “face plant,” it goes something like this . . .

You’ve strapped your feet into your snowboard and begun to slide down the mountain. As you pick up speed, you negotiate a few turns, albeit precarious ones, and you start thinking that this sport--sort of a combination of skiing, surfing and skateboarding--isn’t so tough after all.

You pick up more speed, make a few more turns--sharper, quicker turns--and get a wonderful adrenaline rush with the realization that you are actually surfing this white mountain.

You are on top of the world . . . Splat!

It happens that quickly. You’re stung by the impact of flesh on snow, and flush with embarrassment. But maybe your wrists are throbbing too much to worry about those chortling, finger-pointing jerks on the chairlifts, getting a laugh at your expense.

Humbled by the experience, you push yourself up, brush yourself off and make your way down the mountain, slower and more carefully, vowing to avoid catching another edge at all costs.

Unfortunately, you will catch another edge, and probably yet another before you master the beginner runs and feel comfortable enough to seek out steeper slopes. And then you will do it again.

“In 40 hours you can become very accomplished in snowboarding,” Craig Allsberry, 48, a longtime instructor at Bear Mountain told a group of first-time snowboarders last week. “But it takes some time and energy, and lots of bumps and bruises. The first three hours are pretty horrific.”

Allsberry’s group, part of a media tour that began with a visit to the Ride Snowboard factory in Corona, included about 10 people who had some experience on skis, but none on snowboards.

They watched as the other groups, made up of those practiced in the fine art of carving, busting air, performing double-grabs and saying “Rad!” a lot, rode to the mountain’s highest reaches.

This group began, of all places, at the Magic Minor’s Camp, a theme-oriented area for children, featuring a nearly indiscernible slope reached by conveyor belt.

Allsberry gave a few pointers to speed up the learning process, telling his students, among other things, to lean forward and keep the knees bent while riding, and that a snowboarder should use the front foot, not the back, to initiate all turns.

Half the group mastered this invisible incline almost immediately and was eager to ride an actual chair to an actual run. The other half, it was becoming obvious, would never become snowboarders.

Nevertheless, the preschoolers wanted their mountain back, which meant it was time for the intrepid snowboarders to graduate to an actual hill: the beginners’ slope.

It is an awkward feeling, having no poles with which to propel oneself, or to walk around at the base of the mountain with only one free foot, dragging a plank behind on the other. But everyone managed to successfully get on the chairlift to a run called Inspiration.

With only one free foot, some ended up on their rears after pushing themselves off the chair, which turned out to be no big deal, since they would spend much of the day there anyway.

After more practice and instruction at the top of the run, Allsberry turned his students loose with instructions to meet at the bottom. He stayed behind with the slower learners, while others splintered into smaller groups, based on their abilities.

I took off with three of the more adventurous snowboarders, Liz Buckingham of Powder magazine in Dana Point, Dimity McDowell of Self magazine in New York and Leighton White of Snews magazine in Bend, Ore.

We wanted to shred, clicked into our bindings and began our precarious descent.

We learned a great deal on our initial run. Buckingham, after picking up speed, discovered that a “butt plant” is just as painful as a face plant. She caught her heel-side edge often, and quickly picked up on the most commonly heard phrase on the beginner slope: “Owww, my ass.”

McDowell, the poor soul, never seemed to stay upright long enough to enjoy herself, and her being about 6-feet-3 didn’t help. She crashed like a felled redwood every 50 feet or so and needed no words to describe the pain she was experiencing: Her contorted face said it all.

White seemed to have the best balance. Even when he fell, he did so gracefully, with more of a slide than a thud.

As for me, I thought my surfing experience would pay off, and it seemed to be doing so at first. I figured I’d pick up some speed and make a long, drawn-out carving front-side turn and then make a back-side turn and go the other way.

I was really moving and the adrenaline was flowing, but when I decided to change directions, my board kept turning left, and just when I thought I was going to pull off the unintentional 360, my toe-side edge caught so abruptly that I went down face-first before I could even get both hands in front of me.

My fist dug into my gut, knocking the air out of me, leaving me gasping for the next 20 seconds. What made it worse was that this happened immediately beneath a chairlift. I looked up to see that I had become a terrific source of entertainment for those going up the mountain.

Such is life on the beginner slope, I supposed. And in fact, later in the day it was I doing the laughing at the expense of some other poor slob who had bitten off more than he could chew.

But enough was enough. Three horrific hours had passed and the three of us--we had since lost McDowell, who had fallen once too often to keep up--were snaking our way down the beginner slopes, using our edges, carving turns here and there, daring one another to step it up a bit after lunch.

We took the high-speed quad lift, which took us over icy bowls and steep chutes, wondering what we had gotten ourselves into.

I had dropped into a steep face and was turning left, front-side to the mountain, and immediately found myself moving too fast to start a heel-side turn. It felt as though I were dropping down the face of a giant wave, but the similarity ended there. Ahead of me were the edge of the run and a dense forest of pine, which was getting closer by the millisecond.

Flailing badly, I did the only thing I could to keep from becoming a statistic--a full sprawl--and tumbled to a stop at the extreme edge of the run.

I looked down to see that Buckingham and White were both sitting on the snow as well, which made me feel better. The three of us took turns the rest of the way, doing more sliding on our edges than actual snowboarding, falling often and with various degrees of splat, ultimately reaching the bottom an aching, humbled bunch.

Our brains had obviously turned to mush, because we got back on the quad and repeated this folly before realizing that we were indeed in over our heads. We headed for a beginner run called Easy Street, which turned out to be right up our alley.

White and I were no longer falling, and were getting better with each turn, stopping only periodically to wait for Buckingham, who had obviously had enough.

When she caught a glimpse of the lodge, she decided that was where she wanted to be, so off we went.

McDowell greeted us wearing a cast on a broken wrist suffered in one of her many falls. The others slowly filtered in, and soon the inevitable question was raised: Were the skiers in the group ready to switch from two planks to one?

None said that would be the case, but most agreed that they would give snowboarding another try.

Buckingham, getting around a little more gingerly than the rest, wasn’t so sure, remarking bashfully but in total seriousness, “I wonder if it’s possible to break your ass.”

On your first day of snowboarding, it apparently is.