The weekend wrapup

I started the weekend with another Friday night run to Alpental. Since this is my first season boarding, I don't really have much to compare the conditions to, but now I understand the difference between good snow and bad snow. Friday was bad. Most of the runs were icy and the thought of eating shit on that kind of stuff really didn't make for a fun night. I took a few videos, the funniest being Eric's Snowboard Jump Gone Bad. I'm just glad he was ok, because I felt really bad that you can hear me laughing at the end of the clip. That was brutal. Somehow he caught the front edge of his board right before going off a 4-5 ft jump onto pretty much solid ice. Ouch. We pretty much called it a night after that.

Believe it or not, I actually broke out the Ruby for the first time in about 3 months and did a road ride Saturday! The weather was beautiful so I couldn't resist. I only rode about 20 miles, but managed over 2500 ft of climbing, so that was fun. Surprisingly, I wasn't nearly as out of shape as I thought and was climbing pretty well. My cardio definitely needs some work, but maybe boarding kept me in better shape than I anticipated. I need to get with the program, start commuting to work, and see how much fitness I can build in the next month. I'm planning to kick off my limited road season this year at North Shore.

Sunday I took another few laps on Tapeworm and definitely saw improvement. I managed to ride over some roots and logs I couldn't last weekend and even accidentally landed a 2-3' jump. If I had known it was coming, I would have crashed, but I just rolled right off and didn't kill myself. Awesome.

At least I didn't beat myself up as badly as last weekend. I might have jammed my shoulder a bit crashing into a log and re-irritated my busted rib, but mostly I'm in one piece. I just need to remember to flip my heel back down on the snowboard binding when getting off the lift. First time off I ate shit and fell RIGHT on it. I might be able to sit down normally today.

Saturday night I took a party bus from Bothell to Tacoma to watch cage fighting at the Tacoma Dome. Yeah. I'll put up a separate post on that one...