Ski Trip - Day 1: HELP, I've fallen and I can't get up!

The day started as any other ski trip day 1 that we've been on together. We woke up at the butt crack of dawn, like little kids on Christmas morning, and all got ready to head out to the slopes for our first day on the mountain! Chris and I had never boarded Keystone before, and were super excited to see what the mountain had to offer.

The cool thing about Keystone is that a gondola takes you up from the base. Our condo was pretty close to the base, which was super nice. Not having to ride a lift up before you're warmed up in the cold mornings is great.

What wasn't great was my gear. Since we've never boarded at Keystone, we didn't rent our gear from our normal place in Breckenridge. My snowboard and boots looked like someone had ran over them with a massive semi truck at least 500 times. The guy at the store said it was 'well loved'. Well loved = piece of garbage. I'm not sure why I got quiet and shy at the rental place and didn't say anything more about the POS they had just given me, it was completely out of character for me,

so I took the crappy gear anyways.

I spent the majority of day one on my butt, knees, and fists. A few runs after lunch (the pic is of us going in for lunch...I'm still smiling!), I decided to let the rest of the crew take a break from me and my pathetic falling and have some good runs without me. I sat in the warming hut, rubbed my shins that were throbbing and already bruising, and gave myself a little pep talk.

Motivation was not the issue. My mindset was not the issue. The crew came back to get me after a few runs, (the pictures below are the 3 of them coming in), and we started heading back to the side of the mountain that we were staying on, which was a few good, long runs away. Normally this is awesome. With defective gear and a throbbing body, it was not so awesome for me.

Brett

Chris

Jennifer

It was hard, but I tried (probably with very little success) to not be Debbie Downer and rain on everyone else's first fun day on the mountain. On the last run, I fell 4 times within probably 50 feet of the lift and decided I wasn't boarding down the rest of the slope (I still had a long way to go) and risking breaking anything because of my faulty equipment. When life hands you lemons... I took off my board, sat on it like a sled, and sledded down the entire rest of the mountain, laughing the whole way. Chris boarded right behind me so that no one took me out, and Jennifer and Brett watched from the bottom of the mountain, thinking I had hurt myself and that was the only way I could manage to get down to the bottom until I walked up, grinned, and said "that was SO much better than falling the whole way down!!!"

We finished our first day on the mountains with a few cold, much needed, brewski's. As I iced my shins that night, Chris and Brett looked at the weather report, and Chris and I decided that our 'off day' would be day 2 instead of day 3. The weather called for blizzardy conditions after 12 p.m., so between that, and my pathetic shins, we decided to take day 2 off, relax, and go back to the rental place and get some non-ghetto gear in the morning. I fell asleep to visions of me standing and falling and standing and falling dancing through my head.