Snowboarding

Now I’m new to snowboarding and I’m not very good at it but I’m a fast learner and I’ve came a long way.  When I was younger I used to have one of the old crappy snowboards and would go down vet’s hill.  My friend used to work at Apple Mountain so I thought that would be a good place to start off.  The hill is bigger than vets but it isn’t too big.  I started off like a newborn deer.  I was afraid to go fast and fall because I could break something.  By the end of the day I was going down apples biggest hill, mind you it’s not as big as the hills I go to now but it was a good starting point for me.  My senior year I went on the rec class snowboarding trip and loved every second of it.  I’ve only been snowboarding for a year and a half.  Now I go to Caberfae, Boyne, crystal, and tree tops.  I’m still a little lenient to go super-fast because I don’t feel like breaking anything, but I still go fast.  I like being cold so I figured snowboarding was my calling. Up until last year I would just rent boards and boots, but it started to add up in price.  So last year I bought my own board, bindings, and boots, I couldn’t have been happier when everything came in the mail.  I don’t do anything crazy like backflips or anything I just like carving down the hill and getting to the end and spraying my friends with snow.  This year I’m hoping to be able to go over ramps cleanly.  Last year when I went over a ramp I would push too hard off the ground and my legs would come out from under me. I would then proceed so smash my head on the ground, didn’t feel too good, and I would have a headache for a couple of hours.  I hate failing so I would keep trying to land it before we all called it a day.  Last year me and three of my friends went to Boyne for the weekend and rented a room and stayed there, we are hopefully going to do it again this year and make it a tradition.  

Golf

I used to hate golf, watching it or playing it.  I’m the kind of person to not bash on something if I haven’t done it, so I decided to try it one day with my friends during my freshman year of high school.  Boy was it a treat, I took about 10 shots on every hole and I think I ended up shooting an 82.  Which if you didn’t know is a god awful golf score.  I had fun but I didn’t think I would ever try again because I hate losing.  The next time I went I started to get a feel for it and a shot a little better, 72. Still an awful score, but I realized the more I do it the better I get.  When I first started my drives went far, but they also sliced.  If you don’t know what a slice is, it’s when your club head outs spin on the ball going away from your body.  I could hit the ball 200yrds but it would go 50 yards right, which defeats the purpose.  So I learned to play my slice and I could get the ball in the middle of the fairway.  My sophomore year I went 6 times throughout the summer and kept improving.  My junior year wasn’t much better than my sophomore year but I started to get my short game down, using my irons and wedges.  My best score my junior year was a 52, which isn’t terrible but it’s still bad.  My first time my senior year I developed a love for the game, my first tee shot I aimed way left like I used to and smashed the ball straight as an arrow.  I teed up again and aimed down the center of the fairway and drove the ball just like the first time.  I finally cured my slice and felt like I could do anything.  This last year I shot my best game ever with a 39.  There are still something’s I can work on, my drives are 250yrds every time down the center of the fairway; my chips are on some days but off on others.  My biggest problem is putting; I am the worst putter in the history of golf.  I’ll miss a putt from 2 feet away, and I don’t know what the problem is.  

Lava Tag

During the summer late at night when we don’t have anything fun planned to do we usually just send out a group text message and we meet at Vets Park. When we get the text everyone knows that it could be one of two things, lava tag or capture the flag.  My personal favorite is lava tag, now when everyone was younger every kid played in the living room and you could touch the ground. Now we play at the imagination station and you only get two steps on the woodchips.  But this isn’t like playing in the living room; people make crazy jumps and climb up things that should be climbed on so they are not it.  We have had times that when we left people are full of scratches, blood, and sweat, its and intense game on a structure that isn’t meant for it.  Have you ever heard of free running? Well that’s kind of what our games look like, but there are no flips, tuck and rolls, or wall running.  So when we start the game and have to decide who is it we let fait decided and choose by what every 19 year old kids would do, bubble gum bubble gum.  Once that last foot is stuck in the middle everyone scatters around the park.  The person that is it has 10 seconds before they can get anyone.  If the person that is it takes more than two steps on the woodchips they have to recount and if some that isn’t it takes more than two, then they are now it.  We usually play for an hour or so, or until everyone is gassed out and doesn’t want to move anymore.  Usually after we are done playing we all drive to our friends house and jump in the pool to cool off, and that’s is follow but a couple games of euchre.  We probably do this like two or three times a week during the summer. 

Disc Golf

Have you ever played disc golf?  I’m not talking about at an actual park, I’m talking about just going outside of your friend’s house one day and play with obstacles as the hole, you know like telephone poles, stop signs,  truck beds.  One bright sunny day my friends and I were inside bored to death, and I’m talking about death, we were too lazy to even turn the TV on.  We all came to the consensus that we have to get up are else we will do nothing all day.  So we went outside and started throwing the Frisbee around.  Eventually we were just trying to hit things next to the other person, and then it turned into who can throw it the farthest, and then how many throws it takes to hit something.  We started to keep score and started to me the “hole” around.  We even gave each hole a par number based on how difficult it was.  Like hitting the stop sign from 40 feet away is a par 3 easy to do but having to throw the Frisbee hit a telephone pole and fire hydrant in one throw is a par 15 because is almost near impossible.  The holes range from par 2’s to par 15’s and we keep track.  Whoever won the last hole gets to call out the next hole, and it can be anything they want, car tire, through an open window, first step on the porch, if you can think of it, it’s a hole.  The first time we played, we only played one on one with three holes, but now if we are in a group and we have nothing to do, we just go grab some Frisbees and play a round of 18 holes.  As you can tell by a couple of my blogs I’m in a group of very creative friends.

Ultimate Frisbee

One thing I love to do in the summer and try to do it as much as possible is ultimate Frisbee.  We try to get about ten people so we have two teams of five and we just play for hours.  We play to about five points and then we usually switch up teams and try and make the teams as even as possible.  We play down and vets park on the outfield of the softball fields.  From end zone to end zone is about 200 feet apart and from sideline to sideline is about sixty feet.  The rules are: you cannot double team someone with the Frisbee, You are only allowed two steps with the Frisbee in your hand, if any part of the Frisbee touches the ground before you have possession of it it’s a turnover, you can bump and push but only to a certain extent.  I absolutely love chucking the Frisbee down field as far as I can but I never have anyone on my team that can catch up to it and get it, so I am usually the one sprinting down the field when my teammates hurl the Frisbee.  I hate when I have to dive for the Frisbee, because it’s either a win-lose situation or a lose-lose situation.  If you dive and catch it that’s a win but you’re all itchy, lose.  If you dive and miss it’s a lose-lose because you didn’t get the Frisbee and your super itchy now and have grass or dirty stains on your arm and or shirt.  If I had the choice I would play ultimate Frisbee every day for the rest of my life, but some things are more important, like school, and work.  I try and play as much as possible in the summer even if we can only get two teams of 3, its just more room for me to run and score.  

Olympics

One thing that my friends and I started our senior year in high school was this thing we call the Olympics.  The first year we rounded up 21 people from our grade and a couple from the grades below us.  What we did is we picked 5 countries and randomly drew people’s names to each team one at a time.  We had four teams of four and one team of five.  What we did is we created six or seven games that each team competed in. First place got five points, second got 3 points and third got one point.  Team with the most points at the end of the day gets bragging rights till the next year when teams are again to do all over again.  Every year we have basically the same games: balloon tag, lava tag, volleyball, ultimate Frisbee, and soccer world cup.  This year we got creative and added a couple of new games: egg toss, lightning, scavenger hunt, and a weird ball game that someone created out of nowhere.  This year we had our biggest turn out for people we had 30 people, and believe me trying to play soccer with 30 people on the field is crazy. Every shot someone took ricocheted off of 10 people before you even knew it.  When we created this game we were just joking around in physics class one day with a bunch of friends and we just thought of an Idea and we ended up following through with it.  So far every year the countries that stay are USA, Jamaica and Russia. The 3 other teams are always a tossup; it usually depends on how cool the countries flags are.  Right when summer started to come around this is what all of my friends talk about, nobody can wait until the day of the “Olympics.” When we draw everyone's names to their designated teams we take a car and play the Olympic theme song. We roll up a bunch of newspaper and light it on fire and pretend it’s a torch.  We pass it off from team to team as we run down the road as a huge group of “Olympians.”  I can only imagine what my friends neighbors are thinking when they look out the window and see a bunch of 18 and 19 year old kids running down the road with a lit bundle of newspaper.  

KneeBoarding

 I know I have been way behind on my blog post but I’m going to try and do better from now on.  About a month and a half ago my friends and I went wakeboarding, which is what all my friends and I love to do in the summer.  One of my friends asked if any of us have knee boarded, none of us have so he brought his kneeboard along.  Everyone had a couple runs of wakeboarding but eventually we got to kneeboard.  I never realized how fun and easy knee boarding is. The only difficult part is when you first start getting towed you have to lay on the board and shimmy up to your knees and then you have to hold the rope with one hand while you take a strap you knees to the board,  After you’re all strapped in its smooth sailing from there.  It’s super easy to stay up because your center of gravity is lower to the ground, whereas wakeboarding is harder to stay up because your center of gravity is farther away.  Which makes sense because for wakeboarding you’re on your feet and knee boarding you’re on your knees.  I loved when we went wakeboarding, and tubing but I think I found a new favorite thing to do, knee board.  Now on knee boards there are no fins on the bottom so you can do 360s in the water and other tricks you couldn’t do with fins.  The first time I tried knee boarding I got up the first try, which is usually everyone’s first goal.  Right off the bat I tried a 360 almost got around but got hung-up when I was backwards.  My next run I figured out how to do a 360 and kept doing them, But my friends wanted we to jump the wake so I tried that.   I got a little bit of air but they wanted to see more.  So I complied to peer pressure and hit the wake again I got a little more air.  They kept telling me to go big or go home so on my final run I went as far out as the tow rope would let me and just whipped it back towards the wake.  Now the average height of air for a knee board is about two and a half feet.  On my last run I was going a little too fast and my friends said I got four to five feet of air, while I was in the air I was a little scared.  When I hit the wake my knees moved out of the straps, which isn’t a good thing.  In the center of a knee board there is a little knob, when my knees slid out it went over the knob and when I landed all of my weight went right on to my knee and the knob.  It was probably one of the worst pains I’ve ever had, besides breaking a bone.  I couldn’t even bend my knee it hurts so bad, when I got out of the water there was blood all down my leg,  I probably should have go stiches but I didn’t think I needed to.  I can’t wait to go knee boarding again next year; it’s my new favorite aquatic activity. 

Here is a picture of my knee after Knee boarding.