In our fast paced, high tech, ever-progressing world we have become accustomed to getting what we want, where we want it, when we want it. With high speed internet, cell phones, and fast food restaurants, speed just becomes an expectation. When your sonic burger takes more than 5 minutes, or the internet won’t bring you to the page you want fast enough, or you can’t connect a call, it means that something must be wrong. What was once a luxury is now a given. We cram our daily lives with as much as we can on the basis that things will run as expected, and a screw up, like 10 minutes to get a latte instead of 5, can mess up your whole day. While all of these advancements allow us to run at the highest efficiency possible, it inevitably takes away the ability to be patient. It’s hard to believe that once upon a time people had to wait weeks to simply get a message that we can type on our smartphones and send cross country within seconds.
Sometimes we forget that we can’t just expect things to happen before our eyes, especially in a sport where muscle memory and repetition are the keys to success. We expect because we wish it to be so, it will just happen.
Well, unfortunately this is not always the case. For the lucky few, the action will just click and the trick is there. However for the majority of people, it requires throwing the trick multiple times and understanding the mechanics of the trick before it becomes a stomped trick. It requires patience.
It is almost easy to work hard and be dedicated in comparison. Hard work and dedication requires a physical effort, whereas patience requires a mental effort. Waking up early and putting your body through physical routine pales in comparison to overcoming a repeated bodily beat down trick after trick, doing things you know you can land. The mind is our own worst enemy. The pain of a physical beat down will go away eventually, but the wear and tear of a mental beat down can cause life-changing decisions. Our bodies are much more accustomed to overcoming physical pain than mental pain; it requires a discipline unlike any other.
As it always go, Saturday brought snowy weather and high winds for the Burton Am at Park City. The day before was a beautiful, sunny day. We had been hitting the course all day and figuring out the speed, stomping tricks over and over again. The jump line was looking promising and I had my run all set up. I was feeling confident going into the competition on Saturday, but the winds were definitely gusting. The flags were blowing hard, but that didn’t seem to deter many people. We started out the day checking the speed. It was definitely different than the day before, the first run I knuckled the first, and the second run overshot all three. We had one final run to go before practice was over, and regardless of my speed issues I was still feeling pretty confident. I came into the first one a little slow and barely knuckled, and then took the regular turns into the second. The minute I took off the lip I knew I was going to knuckle the 35 ft step down. At the same time a gust of wind came, and I came down hard to the knuckle to my face and chest. The knuckle and I got very up close and personal. I knocked the wind out of myself pretty badly and got a nice battle scar on my nose.
Needless to say, I was a little shaken up, both physically and mentally. I knew I had stomped those jumps over and over again the day before, but I couldn’t help but feel like I had just been smacked in the face. I went to go freeride to get my feet back under me, and when I came back a couple hours later for my runs, the jumps had been taken out of the competition because the speed was so slow and the winds were so high. It ended up just being a rail jam, and it was so snowy it was even hard to hit the rails. I was feeling pretty beat up, but competed anyways and once again Jessika Jenson got first (even in a competition with three rails!). It was definitely a little bit of a rough day. On another note...
First Urban Feature in Colorado on trailer
Write up in the Stanford Daily:
http://www.stanforddaily.com/2011/01/26/better-boarding/
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