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By leo.flor, March 7, 2011 10:16

When I came back from the west coast with an obsession to ride, one person signed on as an ally in my quest to shred.  We forged a partnership, a sibling rivalry, whatever you want to call it, through snowboarding.  That person is my #1 snowboarding buddy Gina.  No one but us was willing to drive to Blue Mountain over 40 times a season to hit an icy park at night.  We’re witnesses to each others’ greatest achievements and most spectacular bails.  We have also ridden the gnarliest conditions together (e.g. hopping from ice patch to ice patch in the rain on a melting transition at Smuggs to avoid lining up for the bus or getting caught in a half-pipe that was being groomed (do not do this)).   It was her idea to become CASI-certified snowboard instructors so that we could become ambassadors to the sport (though I’m certain the killer discounts on equipment motivated her also).

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A woman of her stature (riding experience and skills) deserves a top-of-the-line shredding instrument and the latest addition to Gina’s collection is the Burton Feelgood Flying V Snowboard.  I asked Gina to evaluate her board for me but she confessed to not having ridden it enough to speak to it in detail.  That was two months ago in Mont Tremblant when she had ridden it only twice.  That was before she went to Aspen on her annual Colorado pilgrimage.

The Feelgood Flying V is a rockstar board on paper, it includes:

• Burton’s latest innovation in binding to snowboard interface, the Channel which essentially allows limitless binding configurations.  I can’t believe I bought a Vapor and new C60 bindings the year before they started doing Channel, such is the fate of an early adopter.  C’est la vie.
• The “Flying V” a double-camber base which is Burton’s latest attempt at the best of all worlds.  Playful flex between bindings for easier butters but enough camber to hold on tight to edges.

If this board were sitting flat on the ground it would look like a cosine wave (and you thought you’d never apply trigonometry).

In her own words:

I would say that this board is the best all-mountain board I have owned.  In Aspen, whether it was groomed runs, the park, or powder, I never felt like the board was lacking in anything.  I would get chatter on other boards when carving at high speed and this includes my older Feelgood but with this board, I could get all the way through turns aggressively and my edges were still gripping.  Despite this being one of the longest boards I’ve ridden, I was still very comfortable in the half-pipe.  It has an interesting flex, the double camber makes it easy to lift your tip or tail for butters/nose-presses and the like.

I absolutely love the Channel system.  It’s not just a gimmick, it is so easy to adjust the position of your bindings against both the length and width of a board.  In freestyle, I could adjust the position of my feet to better my overall body position which affects landings, riding on boxes/rails etc.

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By leo.flor, August 13, 2010 08:28

For those who don’t know, I am a Canadian Association of Snowboard Instructors (CASI) certified level 2 instructor.  It’s nothing fancy, just means I can teach some advanced concepts rather than just keep people on top of their board.

I became an instructor because I wanted to introduce as many people as possible to the sport and I knew that the greatest barrier is the cost of learning it.  Not just the monetary cost of course but also for the next three days you will have pain in places you didn’t know could hurt like that. (unless you’re a natural and were born to ride!)  So, selfishly, because I am close with many people and I LOVE to snowboard, I needed them to snowboard too.  It’s extremely rewarding to watch someone “get it”.

The SWEET discounts on snowboarding stuff may also have had some influence on my wanting to be an instructor.