Fun with Fakie

Snowboarding Surface Tricks | ABC-of-Snowboarding: Snowboard Portal: "Riding Fakie
Riding fakie (switch stance) is simply riding with your front foot at the back and your backfoot at the front. Sounds easy? Well it is not! Everything you have been working so hard to master such as edge control and carving turns is suddenly totally new again as everything you do is suddenly the other way around. Riding Fakie is very important however in learning tricks. It is often the starting and/or ending stance of a trick and it will help you when you are unable to finish a trick and must land halfway."

I was up at Blue Mountain again on Saturday. This time I was teaching a couple of friends the absolute basics of Snowboarding. Since we weren't going to be flying down the hill, I thought this would be a good opportunity to practice riding fakie.

Riding fakie, or switch as it's also known, involves facing the opposite way than you're used to. I normally ride regular (left foot forwards) so my fakie stance is goofy (right foot forwards). The main reason you'd want to ride fakie is so that you can keep going after doing a 180 degree jump. It's not like I'm about to do one of them any time soon but I still like the idea of being able to go both ways.

It's really difficult to start riding the opposite way to what you've learned. It's like being an absolute beginner all over again. As you can imagine, it's pretty frustrating going over the same stuff I've just spent 2 seasons learning for a regular stance. The one thing that made it more bearable was that if I got a bit bored, I could always flip round to regular and then practice my ollies on some moguls.

My regular riding's improved a lot this season and I'm starting to get more air on jumps. It's a lot of fun but this weekend was a bit icy for me. I was going to try a run on a double-black diamond for the first time but I decided against it when I saw how steep it was and how little snow there was as well.