Opening-Day Jitters

I don't know about you, but every year when I'm heading up the lift for my first run of the season I'm a little bit nervous. Maybe it's a combination of being anxious to take my first run and worrying that over the summer my body somehow forgot how to snowboard. But sure enough, every year when I strap in and get going it all comes back to me and I can breathe a sigh of relief. Muscle memory is an amazing thing. It's funny because I'm usually pretty confident in my abilities, but for that brief few minutes when I'm riding the first chair of the season to the top of the run, I have doubts whether I'll be able to pickup where I left off the previous season.

(No opening-weekend worries here. For this ripper, the rails on Sapphire were a welcome sight after a long off season.)

So all this got me thinking yesterday while I was riding the Sachem chair up to the top for my inaugural run. Do the first-day jitters ever go away? At a certain age and after decades of skiing or snowboarding does the year's first run become no big deal? Maybe after experiencing opening-day anxiety enough times and subsequently overcoming it, you realize that it's not worth harping on. I'm not sure though, because I still get it. Maybe after another decade or two I'll see the other side. It's kind of nice though when you take that first run and after just a few yards down the trail, all your worries wash away -- both the first-day jitters and all the rest too.