Just wondering… what do snowboard bums in Whistler do in the summer? I know some of you guys travel to NZ to do another winter, but what about those that can’t or don’t? What happens to them?

Well there’s actually plenty to do! You’re right, some people travel down south to hit the southern hemisphere winter, but just as many if not more stay in Whistler.

It’s a common misconception that Whistler is dead outside of winter. The reality is many places like Whistler get insanely busy during the summer and some of the residents actually prefer the summer to the winter.

I don’t know about every other resort, but Whistler is sort of a mecca for downhill mountain bikers in the summer which is one of the reasons it stays so busy. All those ski runs and gladed terrain become amazing mountain biking trails that stretch for miles.

On top of that there’s amazing warm and sunny weather, hiking trails, lakes, BBQs, paintball, golf, kayaking and more. Don’t forget there’s also glacier snowboarding and many locals coach snowboarding at one of the glacier camps during the summer.

Whistler becomes a sort of mega outdoor playground in the summer. You could snowboard, mountain bike and golf all in the same day if you wanted.

What about work?

Well for those who rely on snowboard instructing for income some become mountain bike instructors in the summer. It’s very common for many locals to be very good at both snowboarding and downhill mountain biking due to living in Whistler for a few years.

There are also all your standard hospitality/service industry jobs in the village. On top of that, many residents take advantage of the larger summer rental listings to lock in new leases at better homes.

So yeah… plenty to do even if you aren’t snowboarding. I know I sound like I’m advertising for them or something, but it really is an awesome place to live.

- Jed

What Do Snowboard Addicts Do In The Summer?

Gear does play a factor in your riding, but often times the gear that most snowboarders have is perfectly fine for learning whatever they want to learn and the reason they aren’t getting a particular technique or trick is because they’re doing something wrong.

Put an amazing rider on a less than ideal setup and he’ll still rip and be able to learn new tricks.

For example, here’s what happens when you combine an awesome snowboarder with a super soft toy snowboard from K-Mart:

Suddenly having a snowboard that’s only ‘okay’ for learning that new trick doesn’t seem so bad… at least your board can actually strap to your feet and doesn’t fold in half when you try to boardslide :p

- Jed

Think Your Snowboard Gear Is Holding You Back? Watch This.

So today I thought I’d talk about a friend of mine called Kate.

Meet Kate

Not everyone living in Whistler comes here to become a pro snowboarder. Many are just here because they wanted to wake up with epic mountains and amazing ski trails outside their door. They came for the lifestyle and quality of life.

Kate is one of those people.

On first glance there’s nothing remarkable about her life. She is a hairdresser from the UK who just decided that she needed a change, so she booked herself into a training camp in Whistler and spent a couple seasons training to become a snowboard instructor.

Fast forward a few years to today and it seems not a huge amount has changed. She still cuts hair, except now she does it in Whistler and she picks up shifts teaching snowboarding on the side. That doesn’t sound very epic.

So what makes her life epic? The quality of her life.

Quality of life means a heck of a lot

You know why people fall in love with places like Whistler? It’s not because they earn more (goodness knows most people in Whistler take a pay cut when they move there), but rather it’s because the quality of life is so much better.

Kate is doing mostly the same thing she was doing back in the UK. The difference is now she does it surrounded by snow capped mountains in a town of insanely friendly people where her days off are spent riding epic terrain like this:

Worth it? I think so.

You don’t have to live a glamorous life with a high paying job to love life. You know what gets me stoked and excited on life? The little things like being able to wake up with this outside my front door.

When you’re surrounded by the things that get you stoked on life, it’s only natural that it brightens up the rest of your life as well.

- Jed

From Hairdresser To Living An Epic Snowboard Life

As I write this he’s raised $980 of the $1600 he’s requested.

Hate it or love it?

Unsurprisingly, he’s getting a lot of mixed responses. There are people donating and congratulating the kid for being pro-active and there are a lot of people hating on him because he’s essentially asking for people to fund his holiday.

Now I personally didn’t donate because honestly I thought the video was bland and didn’t say anything more than “I like snowboarding, please give me money so I can go snowboard.” I’d have been more likely to give him money if his video went more into why he loves snowboarding, his dreams, how he’s worked towards it, his goals etc. etc.

However, I have no problems with what him trying to do a kickstarter type fundraiser to get money for snowboarding. Sure it’s a ’1st world problem’ but so are most of our problems and I can’t fault the kid for wanting to go to snowboard camp.

He saw an opportunity to try something and if he gets his money then good for him. That’s how most business in the world works and he’s not hurting anyone with his kickstarter project.

What do you think?

- Jed

Kid Starts Kickstarter To Pay For Snowboard Camp

You mentioned not liking the ‘business of snowboarding’ and the ugly things that happen behind the scenes with sponsored riders… can you give an example of what you mean?

Well basically I was referring to all the drama and nonsense that happens behind the scenes for the sake of making money in snowboarding. Many things are done for the sake of increasing profits without caring about the well being of sponsored riders and the long term impact on our sport.

I’ll avoid going in-depth or naming names because honestly that stuff just annoys me and I want nothing to do with any of it.

You did ask for an example, so I’ll give you one.

I have a friend who was sponsored pro with a small upstart snowboard company. At the time he was the more well known name and no one knew about the company. He was basically responsible for helping get them into the mainstream eye.

He stuck with them and helped grow their brand even when he could have gotten more money from other companies. However, as soon as the company got a little success they kicked him to the curb with no warning.

That’s just one example of the ugliness and it’s honestly pretty tame compared to many other things that go on behind the scenes.

Don’t get me wrong…

Now please don’t assume I hate snowboard companies that try to make money. I’m a capitalist and I’m 100% behind snowboard companies making tons of money. I don’t see anything wrong with making money from snowboarding.

However, I do believe there’s an ethical way to do business and often that line gets crossed for the sake of a few dollars. I don’t like all the short sighted decisions that screw people over and cut corners just to get a short term increase in profits.

So yeah… I hope that answers your question. As I said, I didn’t go too in-depth because hoenstly thinking about most of the ‘industry’ stuff gives me a headache, so I do my best to avoid most of it.

I’m happy keeping that industry drama and nonsense as far away from me as possible.

- Jed

The Ugly Side Of Snowboarding

Either that or the snowboard tutorials were so awesome that their combined awesomeness crashed the server, but I’m leaning towards the other reason :p

If you experienced slowness trying to get onto Snomie.com today, that’s the reason things were loading slow (and why the site was offline for a short period of time).

What does this mean for our ‘Snowboard Trick Secrets’ course?

Don’t worry, it’s not a major issue and I’ve fixed it already. I just had to move all the video hosting over to Amazon.com’s much more stable hosting service. A lot of huge companies use Amazon’s hosting service so it should be rock solid now.

To be safe I’m giving it a few days on the new hosting to make sure everything runs smoothly since the last thing I want is to launch the snowboard course and have you guys unable to access the training videos because of bugs or crashes.

Nothing major, just better safe than sorry, although it does feel like this launch is becoming some sort of Lord of the Rings epic journey with all these little snags that keep coming up at the worst times.

My apologies for the delays, you guys have been really patient so far so thanks for that! Looking forward to getting this course out in a few days.

- Jed

ps: If you have no idea what our ‘Snowboard Trick Secrets’ course is then I’d start here.

Oops – ‘Snowboard Trick Secrets’ May Have Overloaded Our Server…

In your opinion, what’s the hardest part of snowboard freestyle? What’s the one thing that you wish you could make easier?

Hrm, well there are a few ways to look at your question, so I’m going to give 3 answers. Obviously this is all open for debate, but these are what I would consider to be the hardest things in freestyle snowboarding.

What’s the hardest physical technique/skill to learn in snowboard freestyle?

In my opinion the thing most people struggle with is spinning. They struggle with really getting smooth spin technique mastered (which is actually why I dedicated an entire section of our ‘Snowboard Trick Secrets’ course to spin mechanics).

Everyone can huck spins, but it takes time, effort and a lot of practice to get to that point where you can pop a smooth 360 easily and stylishly every time. It’s a complicated skill with a lot of different pieces that are easy to mess up and ruin the execution.

To me that mastery of basic spin mechanics is one of the key signs of someone that’s a good freestyle snowboarder because I know it didn’t happen by chance and it took a lot of work to get all the parts of spin technique flowing together with that level of mastery.

What’s the hardest general skill to learn in snowboard freestyle?

I’d say knowing how to break down and learn new tricks safely is one of the hardest general skills to learn in snowboard freestyle.

This isn’t because it’s necessarily hard to do, but rather because it takes a certain degree of self control and thinking that most people don’t have until later in their snowboard progression.

It’s hard mainly because by the time we learn that skill many of us have already paid the penalty via injuries and crashes. Unfortunately for many of us it takes those injuries and crashes to make us realize there are smarter ways to break down and plan out the risks you take.

That’s one of the reasons why I focus so much on that area of snowboard freestyle in a lot of the blogs on this site, it’s because I’m hoping it’ll save at least a few people the injuries that most riders get before they learn those skills.

What’s the part of snowboard freestyle that you wish you could change?

Judging the speed of a jump. I wish I could take out some of the factors that complicate the process of getting the right speed when hitting jumps.

I sometimes envy skateboarders because their ramps don’t change speed like snowy run-ins. Skateboarding on wooden ramps tends to be a lot more reliable when it comes to controlling your speed and drop-in point.

With snowboarding you have to pay attention to different drop in points, how hard you edge, how hard you carve, whether you do speed checks, how fast the snow is that day and all those other factors that affect how much speed we have to take into each jump.

Get any of that wrong and you end up coming up short or overshooting a jump and that’s how a lot of injuries happen. Crashing in the landing rarely hurts, but crashing on the knuckle of a jump almost always hurts.

I think the tricky thing with getting the speed right isn’t so much that it’s hard, since most experienced riders get the speed right 9 times out of 10, but rather it’s that 1 rare occasion when you get the speed wrong that can ruin your day.

If I had a way to make judging the speed more reliable and less error prone to get rid of that 1 time out of 100 that you screw up the speed on a big jump, it would save me and every other rider a lot of headache and stress.

So yeah… that’s basically what I’d say are the hardest things in snowboarding. That said, I wouldn’t look at these things as a bad things. In it’s own way beating each of these challenges is part of the fun of learning snowboard freestyle.

- Jed

What’s The Hardest Part Of Freestyle Snowboarding?

For example, this sponsor me video was recently posted on snowboarding forum:

Now this guy isn’t a bad snowboarder by any means and he’d be above most snowboarders his age in general freestyle.

Let’s look at a second video though…

This is Zach Normandin. He’s sponsored and his riding is what would typically be seen as the required level for most entry level sponsored snowboarders:

So besides the fact the second video has a way better camera work, what’s the big difference in the riding of these two snowboarders? Style and execution. Look how much cleaner every trick is in the second video.

The big difference between a sponsored rider and your average good snowboarder is the ability to make their riding look smooth and stylish even on simple tricks. Watch a hundred ‘sponsor me’ videos and you’ll notice there’s a lot of hucked spinning, a lot of arms going all over the place and the general riding looks messy and forced.

That’s your difference.

But I’m not aiming to be sponsored…

You may not be aiming to be sponsored, but I think it’s safe to say most of us would like to ride like a sponsored pro snowboarder right? Well a big part of it starts with cleaning up your execution and style.

Bigger and better shouldn’t always be the goal. Cleaner and more stylish technique is just as important as learning new snowboard tricks and techniques to your skill set.

- Jed

ps: Still on track to launch our Snowboard Trick Secrets course by end of this week, don’t worry, it’s coming.

The Difference Between A Good Snowboarder & A Pro Snowboarder

I wish I had your life. There’s no snow here. I have to hook an old board to a tractor and pull each other down the dirt road.

So… why not make it your life if that’s what you want?

A little story…

As someone who loves snowboarding, I have a pretty epic life right now right? I get to snowboard 100-200+ days per year, travel the world, set my own hours and this all seems ideal for someone who fell in love with snowboarding 7 years ago.

However… let’s go back 15+ years.

Fifteen years ago I was just a small kid in Malaysia. I had seen snow maybe once or twice and never snowboarded. Malaysia is a tropical country and the temperature is about 28-30 degrees celsius year round. There are no ski fields in Malaysia.

When I was about 10 I moved to Australia. My experience with snow growing up in Australia was limited to 1 ski trip with my high school class. Most people in Australia have never even seen snow, we’re a lot more fond of our beaches and sunny weather.

Why am I telling you this? Well because up until 7 years ago I could never have pictured the life I have now.

I get how ridiculously awesome it seems to be able to work from anywhere, live in ski resorts and snowboard every day… and it is awesome, but it didn’t just ‘happen’ and I had no idea it would happen or any clue something like this was even possible when I was in high school and college.

But it is possible…

You have no idea where you’ll be in 5 to 10 years. Plan things out, figure out what you want and what gets you excited about life and make a way to get there.

Just because you can’t see how you might end up in that epic position, doesn’t mean it’s not possible. Do something epic with your life. It doesn’t even have to be snowboarding, but there must be epic things you always wanted to do… there’s no better time than the present to get started.

This blog and this website is about more than just snowboarding and if you’re a long time reader you’ll know that already.

Yeah I give snowboard tips and help other snowboarders progress their riding, but part of this whole thing is about showing others that it’s possible to take a different path, work hard and have an epic life doing the things you love instead of working the 9-5 in a mediocre job you don’t enjoy.

That’s why it annoys me when I get messages  like the one at the start of this blog. Someone killed that guys hope and dreams as he grew up.

When we were kids we believed we could become whatever we wanted. We dreamt of becoming astronauts or cowboys or billionaire space ninjas. Somewhere along the line many of us lose that imagination and belief and we settle for a mediocre job and a mediocre life.

Well screw that. You may be far away from an ideal situation right now, but who knows what the future brings with a little planning, work, and guts. You can do epic things and have an epic life.

- Jed

ps: Still working on how to become a billionaire space ninja… I’ll let you guys know if when I figure that one out.

Why You Have No Idea Where You Could Be Snowboarding In 5 Years

What’s a typical day like for you as someone who gets to snowboard almost every day and works from home? How do you balance work and snowboarding?

Interesting question, not sure if this is all that interesting, but happy to answer it. I guess the easiest way to describe my typical day is to go through it bit by bit.

Here’s what my typical day looks like:

• 8 am: Wake up, eat, walk to the lifts
• 8:30 am – 12 pm: Get my daily snowboard fix. Have lunch.
• 12 pm: Head home (however if the conditions are good or I’m feeling it I’ll keep riding until the lifts close at 3-4pm)
• 12:30 pm – 7 pm: Work. This involves work online on Snomie projects mixed with other online work involving websites/online marketing.
• 7 pm: Dinner and some free time to un-wind.
• 8 pm onwards: Answer Snomie email/twitter/fb messages, continue working on whatever upcoming Snomie project I’m currently working on
• 11 pm: Workout and shower.
• 12 am – 2 am: Sleep sometime around this time.

You can basically summarize my schedule as wake up, go snowboarding, come home, work on my laptop, sleep, repeat. I wish I could make this more exciting, but my days aren’t really special besides the fact that I get to go snowboarding most days.

I still have to work just like everyone else, the main difference is my workday starts in the afternoon after I get my snowboarding fix. Honestly, working for yourself is a lot of work because you don’t have a set ‘off the clock’ time like you do at many other jobs.

I guess snowboarding is the huge bonus of working for yourself though… I’m certainly not complaining

- Jed

A Typical Day At Snomie – Balancing Snowboarding & Work