23 Things Snowboarders Hate About Snowboarding
1) 8 year olds who’re already better than you
Groms who were born on the snow, half way up a mountain, and probably came riding out of the womb switch, wearing a bucket hat with just enough nonchalant irony to be cool.
2) Button lifts
Chair lifts are designed to whisk you back up the hill. Button lifts are designed to leave you stuck at the bottom of the hill, looking like an idiot, and feeling like shit.
3) Lift passes
They cost a lot of money, are always in the wrong pocket, and are far too easy to lose.
4) Shit days
Those days when nothing is working for you, however good you normally are. It’s not that you can’t land your tricks, but it’s as if you can’t even snowboard.
5) Powder days when you’re working
The thought of somebody else getting tracks through that untouched powder while the office bore explains the finer points of correct file management on a desktop, using the dragons from Game of Thrones as a weird metaphor, is hell. Torture.
6) Pre-kicker fear
That nauseous sick feeling that boils in our stomach before your first kicker in a while.
7) Getting stuck in our bindings
Run done, we unstrap, and somehow our feet are still stuck in our bindings. Akin to getting your feet stuck to the floor of an Romford nightclub.
8) Shaun White
Just, Shaun White.
9) Ice
There’s no fun in ice. It’s the fly in the ointment of an otherwise enjoyable time on snow.
10) People who complain about skiers
This is getting really old now. Snowboarders and skiers are all just out there to have fun, and do their thing. The whole skier/snowboarder tribalism is just a bit pathetic.
11) Skiers
The annoying folk on planks who snake us in the park, turn the slopes into a mogul field, and trample all over our boards in the lift queue.
12) Traversing with skiers off piste
Okay, so it’s a bit of a love/hate relationship with skiers, but admitting there are some things they’re just better at, like holding a line while traversing off piste is just.. well, it’s not cricket.
13) Flat spots
The bits on the hill that level out for long enough so us and our board come grinding to a halt, leaving two options: unstrap and walk (humiliating) or rely on a friendly skier – them again – to give us a tow (also humiliating). The very definition of Hobsons choice.
14) Beginners arse
Snowboarding is just about the best thing in the world. Learning to snowboard, however, it just about the worst. You will fall. A lot. It will hurt. A lot. Your arse will be bruised. A lot.
15) Wet Arse
Snowboarding can be a little stop-start. And when we stop, the temptation is to park our arse on the deck rather than waste time unstrapping only to have to strap back in. The result is a cold, wet arse. Kinda makes us look a bit like we’ve had a pant-accident.
16) Wet gloves
Gloves pretty much have two jobs. Keep our hands both A) dry and B) warm. And yet, why is it our hands are so often left wet and cold?
17) Torn gloves
Staying on gloves, why are the pair we bought back in 2004 still in perfectly good condition, but the two new pairs we picked up last November full of more holes than a tramps vest?
18) Broken Bones
From wrists to collar bones – so many collar bones. Why does snowboarding hate the human skeleton so?
19) Fashion
Is it trousers in or out of highbacks this week? Pants with a bib are cool again? Oh, hang on, no they’re not. Mitts. No, gloves. No, mitts again. Bucket hats?
20) Bucket Hats
Nah, buckets hats are never the one. Only the coolest of the cool can pull them of, and if they’re that cool anyway, why have one?
21) Spin-to-win
A dual pet-hate for snowboarders. On one, public level, we hate the concept of competitions being won not by style, but by who can notch up the most degrees on a protractor. However, on a much more personal level, we hate the fact that anything north of a 540 is out of reach for most of us.
22) Language
The lexicon of snowboarding is ever evolving, and each and every one of us puts in as much work as a PHD student to keep abreast of the latest names for tricks, and styles, and headwear, and technology, and board shapes and… it never ends. Keeping on top of it is trickier than keeping on top of cleaning the kitchen.
23) Not snowboarding
The winter seems like an endless bounty of opportunity and, if we’re lucky, days of blue skies, perfect powder, and good times. And then May rolls around each year and we’re stuck with another six months of empty, snowboard-free nothingness. Or, you know, dry slopes.
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