Sport of Snowboarding - Personal Essay

I have come to love the sport of snowboarding since I began when I was 13 years old. The cool bluster of air across my face gave me a feeling I couldn't describe. The entertainment it gave me was unlike any other. It showed me magnificent scenery with beauty I could not see from my local area. Snowboarding brought me to know and now love the exhibition style of long board skateboarding. The same entertainment and beauties I was given through snowboarding were portrayed in different yet similar ways with long boarding. They are in many ways alike while in others entirely different; between steering, tricks, and crashing they are total opposites. These two sports are beautiful to watch but more beautiful to enjoy yourself. If you take pleasure in one of the two, enhancing your boarding entertainment can be achieved by emerging yourself in the other.

The steering of snowboarding allows you to control yourself while cruising down a mountainside. Steering is very important because if you were to attempt going straight down the mountain you would gain a high amount of speed making it highly difficult to control the board, making it much easier for you to fall. To steer isn't a hard thing to do once you get the hang of it and for most becomes second nature soon after learning. When steering yourself on a snowboard you must first lean in the direction you wish to go in, while at the same time sliding your back foot out in the downhill direction. The more you lean and farther you slide your foot out will result in how sharp of a turn you will take. Learning to steer also teaches you how to stop. In order to stop you must lean very hard on the edge of the board and at the same time slide your foot out so that your board is no longer facing down the mountain, but is now facing sideways. Once you've learned to steer and stop soon you will be doing tricks. It adds a new thrill to the beauty of snowboarding. Cruising down the mountain and going off a jump, doing different spins and flips through the air before you come back down to soft landing. Being able to grind across various rails and long wooden boxes gives a new challenge to the sport. When it comes to grinding on a snowboard you can do it many different ways. You can board slide, which is turning your board horizontally while slide across the rail, or 50/50 grinding, which is riding on the rail with your board in the same direction. There are many variations of grinds you can do all which can be challenging or very easy depending on athleticism and skill. How ever, snowboarding down a mountain alone, without adding the jumps and rails can result in a wipeout or crash. These can end fairly badly, but if you look at it statistically, the number of times you fall compared to the number of times you are injured is not close at all. Even the best of the best fall doing simple things and the fact that you are landing on one of the softest natural elements there is, it isn't very painful. However there are the times where you have a great deal of speed and may wind up in a wipeout where you end up tumbling which can cause serious injury due to the fact that you are strapped into the board running risk to ankle, foot, and leg injuries.

Long boarding steering is compared to by a lot of people with surfing. The reasoning behind this is because you steer mainly with your front foot as in surfing you do as well. Long boarding is something you can do on flat ground by pushing with one foot, like a regular skateboard; or you can ride downhill. The steering for riding downhill or on flat land is the same, however you tend to do more steering while riding down hill then on flat land. To steer a long board is very simple and the key to it is solely balance. You lean on your toes or heels depending on which direction you wish to go in, and simply keep a bit more of your weight on your front foot. Steering downhill is more challenging than steering on flat land due to the difference in speed. It can be more challenging to turn while