blogcontent/blog/content/posts/snowboarding-philosophy-and-a-linguistic-tangent.md

title	date	tags
Snowboarding Philosophy, and A Linguistic Tangent	2025-04-09T17:54:09-07:00	Real-Life Snippets

Depending on how you look at it, I just finished up either the worst or the best snowboarding season of my life so far.

It was The Worst Season because:

• Snowfall was the sparsest I'd ever experienced, and the timing of my trips always seemed to coincide with bad weather or sparse snow. Generously, only 2 of the days could be described as having good snow.
• There were more than the usual number of mishaps, misadventures, and gear failures - I had to replace my ski pants, gloves, and helmet due to a combination of failure or misplacement.
• I had the worst fall I've ever taken on a snowboard - so bad I was worried about a concussion afterwards (I was, thankfully, fine) and sported a black eye for a few days afterwards.

But it was The Best Season because:

• I set a new lifetime record for most vertical distance boarded in a season and for top speed in a season¹.
• I discovered the simple joy of listening to a playlist with in-helmet speakers.
• I experienced the most improvement of technique I've ever noticed - both conscious execution of deliberate technique, and unconcious moments of my body intuitively doing "the right thing" before my mind could even recognize there was anything to respond to. Both are great feelings; and the latter is an important reminder of the existence and malleability of the subconcious mind.

There's a Discordian example there on how any and all interpretations are true and no truth is inherent, but I wanted instead to record an observation I made² during this season about The Philosophy Of Snowboarding³:

Something I really like about snowboarding is that it physically forces you to embrace (or at least acknowledge) a philosophy of not letting fear dictate your actions, and of using gentle fluid redirection rather than brute force to achieve your aims.

When going fast, the two most dangerous things you can do are:

• to give in to the instinct to lean back away from the speed - the board will slip out from under you and you'll lose control and fall
• to try to force yourself to slow down by aggressively planting an edge across the direction of your travel - any kind of bump will make you judder, lose control, catch a front edge, and faceplant

Instead, you need to lean into the direction of travel, but smoothly redirect it sideways so the speed gets dampened by moving in a different direction, away from the fall line.

A linguistic tangent

Improvements to my snowboarding technique reminded me of a concept for which I've long sought a name. A definition of the concept would be "a simple piece of advice that can be usefully applied in different ways, across a wide range of experience-levels of a discipline". Typically, though perhaps not always, I expect these would arise in physical disciplines - examples I've often used for snowboarding, tennis, and martial arts are "weight on the front foot", "keep your eye on the ball", and "bend your legs", respectively - although I expect there are probably examples in Software Engineering and other mental disciplines too.

Crucially, this isn't something which is always trivially and obviously true - "go faster than your opponent and you will win the race" doesn't strike me as something that can be re-interpreted or rediscovered as you become a more proficient racer⁴. I'm talking here about a deceptively-simple concept which a beginner might think they have understood and internalized fully, and have progressed beyond the need to remember; only to encounter a challenging sub-skill or technique which requires them to re-examine the simple advice and apply it in a new context.

I remember this concept every year or so and poll my linguistically-aligned friends for a name, but I don't think I've ever heard a suitable suggestion. At least now I'll have a blog post to point them to next year rather than having to explain it from scratch!

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1. shout out SkiTracks for being a rock-solid application and never succumbing to microtransactions, monetization, or any other bullshit. ↩︎

2. that pesky "commitment to truth" mindset that I posess compels me to acknowledge that this is not in fact a direct quotation, but has been paraphrased to elaborate. ↩︎

3. which reminds me, I'm well overdue to re-read Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance - I suspect that "mid-30's me", having worked in Software Engineering for most of my adult life, will have an even deeper appreciation for it than "late-teens me" did. ↩︎

4. though it could potentially be an antidote to overly-complex techniques or mindsets which stray from the core aim - instead of a koan which generates insight by having no answer, a, uhh, "naok"(?) could generate insight by being so obviously true as to prompt you into re-examining assumptions which appear to contradict it. ↩︎