comatose

food comas are best enjoyed after a long day climbing or outdoorsing. case in point, today.

left with the two chucklehead copilots today 'round about eight. hit their parking lot a little after 9:30. we expected single digits and were pleasantly surprised with the teens for most of the day. translation? only three layers and none of them heavy insulation. as long as i was moving, i was doing alright.

fortunately, today was yet another snow day spent on my feet more than on my tail. big progress today. big props to snow for helping me improve all day long. no, i'm not personifying precipitation. for those of you that don't know, a pledge brother of mine's last name happens to be snow, and oddly enough, he also shreds the gnar. quite well, in fact. good pointers from him had me falling all over the place in the morning to confidently running all of the blue trails by the end of the day. i was linking turns quickly and falling rarely. when i did fall, i bounced right back up again and kept on cruising.

right now, it's turned into a mind game of enjoying the adrenaline from the speed and still building the muscle memory to make turning at higher speeds second nature. turning off the anxiety with speed is the first step towards getting better and quickly. fear does funny things to your brain in so-called adrenaline sports. with some, it makes you overly cautious and second guesses your every move. on a snowboard, that can be pretty dangerous. it was the same with climbing; the fear of falling makes you overly cautious and sketch out on moves you can make. the fear takes over, and shuts you down.

i noticed last night at the gym how much my climbing technique has evolved over the years. some movements are so second nature to me that i forget how difficult it was for me to learn them, let alone build the core to make them. i suppose the same is true for snowboarding as well when friends are trying to help me straighten out my game strapped to a 154cm waxed piece of wood.

twelve hours later, and one cracker barrel coronary special, i am all sorts of comatose from fatigue and food. catch you on the flip side!

siiiiiiiick

as i delve deeper and deeper into so-called fringe sports, i'm learning a few things. last month, she and i saw a film on a swedish base jumper. the point was made that as the once-terrifying becomes mundane, the base jumper takes bigger and bigger risks. to this end, the "career" of a base jumper lasts 6 years. three reasons, the jumper dies, the jumper gets seriously hurt, or the jumper walks away. no exceptions.

same deal with snowboarders i'm told. at some point, the double black diamonds stop being terrifying. enter the terrain park. jumps, flips, tricks. the adrenaline rush returns with each new challenge. on a different track, enter free riding of big mountains. you know shaun white's name. he won a few gold medals in the olympics. owns the x-games. this documentary i recently saw called first descent showed this very talented freestyle terrain park wiz kid's first forays into free riding. i'm talking alaskan mountains. fresh powder, but damn near vertical faces and 30 foot drops on some runs. just feeding that adrenaline addiction.

climbers seem to take a more natural progression. boulderer to sport climber to traddie with tangents off into free soloing or deep water soloing, as the skill or mental deficiencies of the climber allow. i thought in comparison to the aforementioned sports that climbers were sane. nope. not even close. thanks for sharing this one with me clowe. check it out. dean potter proves that climbers aren't immune to the desensitizing nature of adrenaline sports.