Just finished my final snowboard lesson yesterday, so the course is starting to head towards its final stages. My riding has improved a lot, but more importantly, even when I lapse back to old habits – which I tend to do on the steeper off-piste stuff and in trees – I now know exactly what I’m doing wrong and what I should be doing instead. Given that I’ve another 8 weeks of snowboarding to go, I’ve plenty of time to improve even further.

I had a day off today, so I went back up the hill and forced myself to ride switch, as I’m hopeless at that and I’ll never be comfortable doing 180-degree jumps until I can land or take off switch. After a morning on the beginner’s slope, including an embarrasing fall on the beginner’s lift (memo: ride normal when using lifts!) I headed up the hill and managed to link turns down a blue run, which was a marked improvement over the last few days. Still, I’m nowhere near fluid, but at least I’ve made some progress and if I just do a little each day now I should be sweet.

Now that the lessons are over, I start the official instructors exam course on Saturday, with the final assessment being on Monday. There are two parts to the exam – the riding part, where they make sure you are a good enough rider to be an instructor, and the teaching part. I’m reasonably confident of passing, as our instructors have already said we should pass the riding side and we’ve also done some demo teaching sessions as well. Having said all that, if I fail I don’t really care – I’m 34 so there’s no way I’ll ever use an instructor qualification ;-)

Anyway, I’ve finally put some photos online:

Fernie