Overcoming My Mountaintop wipeout
By Lindsay Madison
The Pursuit of Happiness Can Be A Lot
Like Snowboarding Down the Slopes
went to high school in
Northern Michigan,
where we would ditch
class early on Fridays so there would be enough time to get a few runs in at the local ski hill before dinner. So when a friend invited me to go snowboarding when I was visiting her family’s home in Colorado a few years back I thought it would be a fun way to
spend the afternoon. Naively, I assumed snowboarding would be similar to skiing. It. Was. Not. Just getting off the lift and strapped to the board was enough to raise my heart rate and I hadn’t even started yet! Then I couldn’t seem to stay up on the board. Like, at all. I slid about one fourth of the way down the hill on my butt before I finally made it up onto the board with some steadiness. And then, just when I thought I was getting the hang of things, I caught the toe edge of my board and wiped out. I smacked my tailbone into the mountain so hard that I felt a shiver go through my whole body. I immediately began to weep. I didn’t know how I would get down the mountain because at that point strapping my foot back to the board was not an option. I laid on the bunny hill, looking up at the sky, tears streaming down my face, wondering what I would do for the next few hours while my friend snowboarded.
I