I woke up this morning to overcast, dark skies above St Anton and snow pouring down. In short, it really wasn’t the greatest skiing weather, and today started to seem like it might be a wasted day spent inside. It was only when the man in the ski/board rental shop offered to lend me a board for a day that I sensed that the day might not be such a waste after all. Initially, I was fairly apprehensive, though the opportunity to spend all day outside, albeit, on the nursery slopes seemed better than the alternative, staying inside.

It was about 10 o’clock when I strapped in to my snowboard for the very first time. The first challenge, standing up, proved initially much harder than I could have possibly imagined. With this mastered, it was then time to progress on to actually moving on a snowboard.

Much of the first half hour was spent on my bum, as I started to get a feel for stopping myself on a board. This is done by digging in your heel edge, which quite often results in falling over backwards when it goes wrong.

As young children started whizzing by me on the nursery slopes frustration started to mount. This spurred me on. In order to continue my progress on a snowboard, I needed to go further up on the slightly bigger part of the nursery slope. In order to do this I needed to go up a button lift. I quickly found that doing a button lift on a board presents a much bigger challenge then it does on skis. Directing yourself straight up the mountain proves to be very difficult as when learning to board the majority of the time is spent sideways on the heel edge of your board. This means travelling on a button lift requires a significant amount of concentration as well as some trial and error to find out what works for you.

After just over an hour spent learning to board, I became fairly competent at ‘leafing’ down the nursery slope. This involves going down a slope using your heel edge to stop whilst guiding the board by putting pressure on either end to bring it round one way or another. Doing this creates a pattern similar to that of a leaf falling from a tree down the slope.

The next big step up was to try and get forward and change from my heel edge to my toe edge, as boarding properly requires alternating between the heel and the toe edge. This proved to be possibly the biggest challenge yet, and resulted in to me face-planting, very painfully, several times. After about an hour of this, and with very painful arms and shoulders I decided to bring my first day of boarding to an end.