I was at Xscape Castleford last night for 2 hours of freestyle fun. I even brought my new board having finally nailed down my sizing with the size calculator.
I got talking to a guy and ended up sessioning the box and rail with him, which was really good because he helped me to learn a new trick. He’s a wakeboarder originally but it turns out wakeboarding can help with snowboarding. Who knew!
Well, actually we started off talking about me wanting to do some sort of frontside boardslde with rotation, but what I ended up doing was a backside tailslide (couldn’t find an example of the snowboarding version). I’ve gotta say that I’m not exactly au fait with the various trick definitions – but the goal was to spin backside onto the box and then do some kind of press/slide with my back facing down the hill. That’s why I ended up doing a back-tail instead of a front-board…
It’s a pretty sick feeling. Last night was the first time I’d tried this, and first time up I had my weight too far over my toe edge and ended up on my knees. However, apart from that and a heel edge snag – which resulted in me sliding head first down the box on my back and then dropping off the end – it all went pretty smoothly.
I wanted to rotate it round so that I ended up pretty much doing a nose press and popping off the end fakie. The tip I got here was simply to look down at the outside of my back foot, the one that I was pressing the tailslide on, which totally worked.
I moved on to trying to 180 out, which would put me back to riding regular, but this was kinda hard. The problem was the position that I had my shoulders and arms in to prompt the slow rotation: it wasn’t good for spinning out a further 180 in the same direction. From that position it felt more like I should have popped a 180 ollie back in the oposition direction to the rotation, but that was hard too 🙂
More to work on next time. Great boarding.
I managed to cause further damage to the Kink, which is now firmly on it’s last legs. Probably time to get a new board and do a review of this one. I also got some new boots – read about them in my DC Judge Snowboard Boot Review.Â