Goofy?

Dude! Check out the board. It’s still regular. I can’t believe it!

Regular, for all you that don’t know yet, is a board on which the bindings are mounted to make you face to the left. Goofy is the opposite. The terms, I am told, come from wave surfing, the sport closest in physics to snowboarding.

When I went to do my first boarding trip ({moszoomalbum:2004-12-26}) I had no idea at all and ended up choosing regular more because I felt like a regular guy (stop laughing!) than anything else. I realized later that I had been too rash, but by then I had spent so much time getting comfortable, I didn’t want to change things around.

A friend then told me how to tell whether you are regular or goofy-footed: stand upright with your feet parallel. Then have someone push you with both hands forward. If your stabilize yourself with the right leg, you are regular. That simple. I came up with the left leg.

Of course, now I have been a regular for one season, and I am still a little hesitant to move things around. I am comfortable where I am, and it takes a little work to change the bindings. Still whenever I got to Heavenly after a couple of weeks of hiatus, my first run always told me: you are feeling too weird!

Of course I do know a bunch of people that don’t care and change binding direction at random – even specifically mount their feet in parallel and buy symmetric boards, so they don’t even know the difference.

And there probably isn’t much of a difference, anyway. Once you are on the slope, you are flying, and the direction doesn’t matter.