Reality Check

Reality Check
An inside look at how today’s best riders get on their game and keep it

Published: Snowboard Canada Women’s Annual, 2007*

Have you ever wondered what would feel like to drop a big-mountain line in Alaska?

Like really thought about it. About what would go through your mind while perched on top of a razor-thin ridgeline, staring down a chute that has 10 feet of visibility before a blind turn releases you into the white void below.

What would you do? Poop your pants? Yeah, that would be my first instinct too. Not only are the consequences of this kind of riding dire – you know: grievous injury, death, that kind of thing – there’s no way out! There’s no mellow way down! It really is all or nothing.

When you take the time to really think about it, the realities of pro snowboarding are pretty mind-boggling. Dropping into a halfpipe with the whole world watching, scoping out desolate mountain peaks in AK from a helicopter, contests with $100,000 on the line, being the guinea pig to a newly built, untested backcountry jump.

It’s those moments –those high-risk, high-pressure moments – that make you wonder: what does it take to ride at that level? What goes through the best riders minds as they make life or career-risking decisions? And how did they get so good?

We set out to interview four key riders in women’s snowboarding and find out the answer to that very question. Whether it’s heading into the wilds of Alaska, scouring the world for new rails to shoot, or grinding it out in the pipe, the following riders tell us how they work year-round to constantly improve, and progress, each season.

Putting it all on the line (again) in AK with Annie Boulanger
Annie Boulanger has always been a bit of a rebel in Canadian snowboarding. She was the first out of the newest generation of pro girls to really embrace sled culture and has since worked on improving her backcountry skills with single-minded focus and drive.

Annie is well known for her determination. When she decided to pursue backcountry riding seriously, she dropped out of the contest circuit (completely terrified she’d lose her sponsors) and focused solely on improving her skills outside of the park. It paid off in a banger part in last year’s Ro Sham Bo, the all-girls shred movie from Misschief Films.

This year, Annie did it again. Instead of spending prime spring filming time in the more reliable BC backcountry – a crappy winter for shooting meant the spring season was extra-crucial – she capitalized on an opportunity to shoot in the nearly-always unreliable Alaskan backcountry.

“It has been my vision for the past two years to go to Alaska someday and I wasn’t sure the opportunity was ever going to come along. I think that, with most pro snowboarders, you have to go at least once to know what it is. To me, that’s maybe what being a complete rider is.”

The trip was planned with the Absinthe Films (Pop, Futureproof) crew, and included some of the most experienced riders in the game (Romain De Marchi, Nicolas Mueller). It turned out to be one of the most intense learning experiences of her career.

She knew the riding would be tough: blind pow turns, nimbly avoiding rogue rocks, snow sloughing down the mountain face behind you. It was off the mountain, though, where she encountered the most unexpected challenge – having to speak up for herself in a helicopter full of extremely ambitious, highly experienced riders.

“When you’re the rookie, and the only girl … it’s hard to step in and say ‘well I want to go do this and you have to not shoot anything and concentrate on me while I do this thing that’s half as good as what you can do…’ You know? It’s just hard to get the confidence to speak up and ask people to come and take the time to film you.  I think that’s something that comes with time, after you’ve spent time hanging out and have confidence in the crew you are with.”

It’s a theme she comes back to often throughout our conversation a few short weeks after she returned home. But because she’s Annie and the learning experience is so paramount to how she enjoys snowboarding, it was more than worth it. She’s not afraid to go back to square one in order to build the skills that will pay off in the years to come.

“Everything is different than anything you have done before so it was like going back to baby steps,” she says. “Every day I would come back to my condo pretty shut down, not feeling that good – because it’s not like you went to the park and you didn’t learn your Backside 5. It was like you were standing on the top of the ridge and you just can’t go down like the other people are. You just don’t know – you have to learn everything all over again.

“I really enjoyed the experience but it was really hard,” she continues. “My mentality was to learn for the years to come. I was expecting to watch people ride, to learn and then come back home, think about it and just let it soak in.”

Big wins and busted ribs with Erin Comstock
It’s the Friday night rail jam at the 2007 Vans Cup in Tahoe, California and practice was going super smooth for Erin Comstock. She was sessioning the jam’s down-flat-down rail easily and felt confident about the contest. But once the judging started, so too did a frustrating trend in her runs – sliding off before reaching the end of the rail. It happened once, twice and three times and then, disaster:

“I caught my nose on it,” she recounts, the exasperation of the moment still vivid. “I flew down to the flat part and hit my chest – where I broke my rib – I hit so hard. My ears were ringing, my jaw was hurting, I knew something happened to my ribs because I couldn’t breathe.”

Winded, clutching a busted rib, she did the only thing that made sense to her in the moment.

“I knew, mentally, that I could do it because I did it in the practice and I was like ‘I’m going to do it and I don’t care.’ So I marched straight back up there and did it. I don’t know if that’s how I ended up winning because it was a pretty gnarly fall I had. But I was stoked. If I mentally know I can do something, I can’t – even if my body fails me when I try – let that scare me.”

Getting back on the horse – it’s a terrible sports cliché, but it is never truer than when snowboarding in contests through injuries and bad weather. Your reputation as a rider is out there for the public to judge, there’s money on the line and your sponsors would just be so tickled if you threw down a win. So how do you dust off the snow off your pants, pick up your hat and put yourself in the line of fire one more time?

Determination, Comstock says, and listening to your gut. If you know you can do it, and can picture it in your head, you’re good to go. It’s the same attitude she takes into filming parts for a movie every year. Finding the right rails to film and then making sure you get them done during often-short trips takes strategy. Comstock does her research, and then listens to what her ever-so-knowledgeable tummy has to say.

“I usually get feelings towards certain rails – some rails I’ll be like ‘no, I’m never going to do that rail’ or other rails I’ll be ‘yes, that’s the one I want to do’. It’s just kind of a feeling thing. I’ve been really lucky – the only time I’ve really hurt myself was at the Vans contest on a contest rail!” she says laughing.

“I’ve been really lucky when it comes to straight rails, and I think that a lot of it has to do with following my intuition and knowing I can do the rail I see. It definitely is an instinct thing for me. I don’t like pressured into doing things – rails are scary enough as it is. If I don’t feel confident, I’m not going to hit it.”

With possible parts in both the Runway Films all-girls movie and the Roxy team movie (both unnamed as of press time) coming up, Erin’s strategy could pay off in one of her most high profile seasons to date. “I’ve looked at my own footage and I think it might work out but I’m just crossing my fingers,” she says. “It should be pretty cool.”

Up, up, up and out of the pipe with Kelly Clark
When Kelly Clark unleashed her sport-redefining halfpipe run at the 2006 Olympics, it might have been hard for your average viewer to fully grasp the significance of her run. On the surface, it was heartbreaking – a perfect, winning run startlingly capped by a fall on the very last hit to cost her the podium.

But no one in the snowboarding community was mourning the lost medal – because that fall was merely what happened after Kelly busted out some of the hugest airs anyone had ever seen a female do in a competition halfpipe. It was such an epic run that she still hears about it “at least twice a week” to this day.

Kelly’s path to ‘06 Olympics started at the Mount Snow Academy in her hometown of Mount Snow, Vermont – where she signed up to score the school-free afternoons the sports academy provided for training. She had to compete on the weekends to remain at the school and, somewhat unintentionally, soon made it on the US team.

Her achievements since that somewhat casual start, however, have not been any sort of fortunate accident. Her climb up and way, way out of the pipe has come from steady, solid work ethic since she first realized that this snowboarding might be something pretty serious. She was working on her amplitude when she won gold in the 2002 Olympics and has been pushing for more of it since.

“I started small, but I put it on my priority list to maintain amplitude as well as style in everything I did. Through the years I held that esteem higher than anything else. Even when I wasn’t being rewarded for it in contests, it was something that I thought was really important: to maintain the progression.”

Her recipe for going big? Being comfortable, going fast, having your basics dialled in to the point “where you can do them in your sleep” and knowing exactly what your snowboard is going to do when even the smallest muscle twitches. This, she says, enables you to take all of those skills ever faster and ever bigger as you practise.

Another, perhaps equally important, part of the recipe is fitness. Knowing that your body can handle whatever you throw it at is crucial to getting that big air and travelling at the high speeds that are required to get it.

Her snowboarding team, The Collection, has a trainer who travels with them during the winter. In the summer, she surfs, mountain bikes and hits the gym four times a week to stay in shape. It’s not a question of just being strong, she says, being fit helps reduce injuries and staying healthy is a major part of achieving her next goal – to compete at the 2010 Olympics in Vancouver.

“I’ve been snowboarding at a professional level for a long time,” she says. “I’ve been on different teams with different workout programs and for years [at a time] I’ve opted not to and I just see a drastic difference – that’s why I do it. I see the longevity of my career being a key component to that.”

Dancing in the park: Anne Flore Marxer
Did you catch the Runway Films trailer when it was released this spring? And did you see the shot of that sassy girl in the blue jacket, out in the sunny backcountry, with her bright red pants down around her knees? Meet Anne-Flore Marxer, full-time professional snowboarder, part-time silly pants.

One of the most fearless, going-big girls in snowboarding right now, Anne-Flore Marxer exploded onto the scene a few years ago with her big smile and super big style in the European backcountry. Born in Switzerland and based in Europe, Anne-Flore’s attitude to snowboarding is simple: have as much fun as possible while going as big as possible.

Her filming efforts this year were originally supposed to be toward a European guys snowboard movie, which she had been really excited about. But winter never came to Europe and after getting skunked time after time, she booked a trip to Canada to travel BC’s Interior with a crew that included a fellow French-speaking counterpart, Marie France Roy. It was the “trip of the year” she says, which is good, because superlatives are a key part of a successful Anne-Flore riding experience.

“I like to have fun and that’s when I ride the best and progress the most,” she says. “Fun is when I go filming in the backcountry with girls like Marie France Roy. It doesn’t feel like work and it’s productive. I love riding with MFR cause we have so much fun on the mountain together. We push and support each other and we laugh a lot!”

It’s good, then, that Anne-Flore considers going big as a pretty fun activity in itself. Riding in groups is important to her and riding with people who will push her to try things even more so. She doesn’t like standing alone at the top of a gnarly drop-in to a giant backcountry jump, freaking herself out and waiting to nudge her snowboard forward into the zone. She’d much rather be with a group, studying the way they ride the jump and emulating the speed at which they hit it.

It’s always scary hitting those kind of jumps, she says, but she lives for the adrenaline rush that it brings.

“I like speed and I like the feeling when you take a big jump – I like the feeling of flying! I really do. [When you’re standing at the top] your heart is beating like crazy, but as soon as you are in your line, the fear goes away. You are still super excited and focused but you know what you are doing. Then, when you get to the bottom, you are just so happy – the only thing you want to do is go back up and do it again!”

Like Kelly Clark, Marxer has learned the hard way that off-season fitness is a key part of having successful future seasons. A summer of travelling around last year left her vulnerable to a knee injury this season and it was decidedly not fun.

So how would she do things differently this summer? The Anne-Flore way, of course. “I’ll be surfing everyday – my bed is less than 50 meters from the beach,” she explains happily. “I’ll bike in the mountains and dance a lot! I’ll be taking rock n’ roll and salsa dance classes! I’ll party too and dance all night! I don’t drink, so when I go out I get the fun part of the night only!”

The Right Stuff
It’s easy to forget how much goes into a single spread in a magazine or even the smallest part in a movie. How often have you pictured yourself in their position, sluicing through Alaskan pow without a care in the world?
Although it sometimes may look easy – even though days or even years may have gone into getting a single shot –there’s no magic formula for becoming a successful pro rider. Good old-fashioned talent, hard work and complete dedication is the closest you can get to a recipe for pro snowboarding success.
The one thing that seems to be easiest – having fun – is the one thing most of our riders mark as critical to their success. Like any other job in the world, you have to love what you do. Ironically, Annie says, it’s her love of snowboarding that ends up putting the most pressure on her game.
“The whole time I was in Alaska, I was like ‘I can’t believe this is where I’m at today. This is kind of a joke: this is where snowboarding has taken me?’ You have to realize that this is what makes you love it. It’s hard to mix that with the pressure of what you have to do with getting a film part and getting the shots. It’s kind of a fear of losing it – that’s what the pressure is.”

-end-

*Story as submitted to magazine/unedited.