16/01: 180s all 'round
Category: Skiing/Boarding
Posted by: ajmilne
It was 180 day at Tremblant today.
The eldest was working on ‘em as flat turns in her group class, she reports. She’s been bumped up a few classes after the blue-centric group they’d put her in last week was a serious snooze for her. She now seems much more happily challenged. Blacks, moguls, small jumps. Much more her speed.
And me, I managed a large handful of the same frontside over kickers today.
Both to and from switch. A few dozen of the former, half a dozen or so of the latter. All over the medium and large ramps in the high North side park above the Lowell Thomas lift.
Few of them were what I’d exactly call elegant. But most involved landing essentially intact and fully-rotated.
The rotation thing was actually harder to nail going to fakie. Kept chickening out, underrotating, landing on edge, much as I tend to do when doing them off a hop. But the nice thing about the kickers (these are marked medium and large, tho’ honestly, with the pretty landing ramps, they’re considerably less imposing than others you might also see so marked) is the space and time they give you to get the board fully swung ‘round. And thus I did get easily half of them happening that way, tho’ still not as consistently as I’d have liked.
I only had one really substantial crash. Somehow got confused once, going to fakie—one of those I hadn’t really rotated—tripped over my toe edge after landing it. My right shoulder is still complaining if moved certain ways. But with any luck, it’s nothing permanent.
Notes: they’re really not that scary, once you’ve done a few. As you’d expect, going to fakie, the scary part is landing; coming from, the hard part is taking off. As mentioned, my vice when going aerial to switch is mostly underrotating—tho’ I had some rather more minor issues with overrotation, too, going that way—more in a sec on that…
Coming from switch, my main problem was burning off too much momentum on the ramp, taking off too slow. I’m still kinda finding the nerve to hit a kicker at decent speed in switch, go fig. But those, generally, ended without drama, at least. Just didn’t look as pretty. I can swing the board that way with no air under it, after all.
I hadn’t originally intended to do either of these over kickers, yet. But I’d managed to find some armoured shorts—protection in case of hard landings for tail bone, hips—and after managing several of both moves from a hop, and finding I was getting that much more comfortable with ‘em, I got to thinking, ah, hell, no time like the present. Let’s try some of these over the kickers. Least the first variation—air to fakie.
And after I’d pulled off a solid count of those, and they’d gone painlessly enough—I started thinking I might as well try the other way ‘round, too.
About the shorts: this had been the plan, a while. But since, as mentioned, my only real screwup was tripping over that toe and taking the worst of it in my very upper body, they wound up only providing a little reassurance.
(But hey, this by no means renders them superfluous. Reassurance is good. This was part of the point.)
About over-rotating going to fakie, yeah, that happened a fair bit, too. Generally, if I got far enough around that you could properly count it as a 180, it was actually more like a 210, and while I could still land it, I had to deke pretty hard to set up the next jump.
Which, I guess, at least bodes well if I do decide 360 is my next stop.
I’ll have to get back to you on those, I guess.
The eldest was working on ‘em as flat turns in her group class, she reports. She’s been bumped up a few classes after the blue-centric group they’d put her in last week was a serious snooze for her. She now seems much more happily challenged. Blacks, moguls, small jumps. Much more her speed.
And me, I managed a large handful of the same frontside over kickers today.
Both to and from switch. A few dozen of the former, half a dozen or so of the latter. All over the medium and large ramps in the high North side park above the Lowell Thomas lift.
Few of them were what I’d exactly call elegant. But most involved landing essentially intact and fully-rotated.
The rotation thing was actually harder to nail going to fakie. Kept chickening out, underrotating, landing on edge, much as I tend to do when doing them off a hop. But the nice thing about the kickers (these are marked medium and large, tho’ honestly, with the pretty landing ramps, they’re considerably less imposing than others you might also see so marked) is the space and time they give you to get the board fully swung ‘round. And thus I did get easily half of them happening that way, tho’ still not as consistently as I’d have liked.
I only had one really substantial crash. Somehow got confused once, going to fakie—one of those I hadn’t really rotated—tripped over my toe edge after landing it. My right shoulder is still complaining if moved certain ways. But with any luck, it’s nothing permanent.
Notes: they’re really not that scary, once you’ve done a few. As you’d expect, going to fakie, the scary part is landing; coming from, the hard part is taking off. As mentioned, my vice when going aerial to switch is mostly underrotating—tho’ I had some rather more minor issues with overrotation, too, going that way—more in a sec on that…
Coming from switch, my main problem was burning off too much momentum on the ramp, taking off too slow. I’m still kinda finding the nerve to hit a kicker at decent speed in switch, go fig. But those, generally, ended without drama, at least. Just didn’t look as pretty. I can swing the board that way with no air under it, after all.
I hadn’t originally intended to do either of these over kickers, yet. But I’d managed to find some armoured shorts—protection in case of hard landings for tail bone, hips—and after managing several of both moves from a hop, and finding I was getting that much more comfortable with ‘em, I got to thinking, ah, hell, no time like the present. Let’s try some of these over the kickers. Least the first variation—air to fakie.
And after I’d pulled off a solid count of those, and they’d gone painlessly enough—I started thinking I might as well try the other way ‘round, too.
About the shorts: this had been the plan, a while. But since, as mentioned, my only real screwup was tripping over that toe and taking the worst of it in my very upper body, they wound up only providing a little reassurance.
(But hey, this by no means renders them superfluous. Reassurance is good. This was part of the point.)
About over-rotating going to fakie, yeah, that happened a fair bit, too. Generally, if I got far enough around that you could properly count it as a 180, it was actually more like a 210, and while I could still land it, I had to deke pretty hard to set up the next jump.
Which, I guess, at least bodes well if I do decide 360 is my next stop.
I’ll have to get back to you on those, I guess.
