Wayback Wednesday: August 22, 2018 ~ Breckenridge, Colorado

It’s been a long time since I last skied but back in my college and post-college years I would try to get out to the mountains at least three or four times each winter. In the winter of 2010/2011, however, I changed things up and tried out snowboarding for a season. For my first day of snowboarding I took an all-day lesson at Breckenridge Ski Resort in Colorado, which is where today’s photo comes from. Having a bit of skiing experience already I wasn’t quite starting at square one when I got on the snowboard and I did better than most of the other people in the class that day, but I still had a long way to go before I could go down the mountain with confidence. Facing sideways, in particular, felt really unnatural to me. On the other hand I did like how much more comfortable snowboarding boots are compared to ski boots. By the end of winter I felt moderately proficient at snowboarding, though unfortunately the last day I went snowboarding I took a really hard fall and came close to twisting my knee badly.

Unrelated to snowboarding, there’s a fun little fact about the t-shirt I’m wearing in this photo, and it relates to why the photo exists in the first place. The logo on the shirt is for Podcast Beyond!, a PlayStation-themed podcast that I used to listen to religiously in years past. In late 2010 Podcast Beyond! started selling these shirts and I bought one right after the hosts announced that the shirts were for sale. The hosts of the podcast soon thereafter had a segment of the show where people who had bought the shirts could send in photos of themselves and have their names read on the show, so I wore the shirt to my first snowboarding lesson for the purpose of getting a photo to send in. If you look up episode 171 of Podcast Beyond! and fast-forward to around the 47-minute mark you can hear host Greg Miller read my name along with the other people who sent in photos that week. Greg mispronounces my last name, but that’s sort of an honor since it was a running joke on the show about how bad he was at pronouncing names. Also, and I can’t prove this, but I might have been the first person to purchase the Podcast Beyond! t-shirt in the color blue. The official color of the Podcast Beyond! t-shirt is black, so I don’t think too many people bought a blue shirt like I did, and while there’s definitely the chance that someone else got their order of a blue shirt in before me, I was the first person who’s name got read on the show that Greg mentions as wearing a blue shirt. Because of this I claim to this day to be the first person to sport the blue Podcast Beyond! t-shirt.

BEYOND!!!