Markus on Season edit, a near lose and a win.
The snowboarding season is really over for this year. ‘Tis the season of champagne and beer.
Look I made a poem.
No seriously, it’s been a great, though challenging year. I’ve learned quite a few tricks, but I’ve also battled with lack of motivation and destructive thoughts.
Right after new year I caught the feeling that snowboarding just wasn’t fun anymore. My riding felt really off, even though I did tricks that I had never done before, and I just didn’t get happy from snowboarding. Which really sucked.
I am lucky enough to be able to work with something I love, and help other people as devoted to snowboarding as me to get better. So not only did it suck because it didn’t make me happy. I also felt ashamed and ungrateful that I had those feelings.
But what helped get me out of my funk was doing one of the things that got me into snowboarding in the first place, that I’ve neglected the pas years since it’s quite time consuming. And that was to get creative.
Since the times with the Quite Alright crew I’ve looked at spots and dreamt about what you could do there, where the camera angles should be and how you could edit it to make it look even better. I often point to spots and tell my students what I see. But I just never did anything with those thoughts.
So with my camera, my snowboard, a shovel and riding around my home town on my bike, I hit the streets and tried out the spots I had pointed out. It became like therapy for me.
Just focusing on the task, by myself, alone with my mind and my snowboard and the trick I wanted to get. Not to make a video project, but to make me feel good. It dawned on me that I had been doing the same thing over and over, waiting for the feeling to change. Becoming a slave to monotony and habit and the thing that broke me out of it was committing to creating something.
My solitary street missions lead to solitary hike missions up on the mountain and soon I started to enjoy the park riding as well. Riding with my girlfriend, my brother and my mother was fun and not boring or dull, the thing I dreaded to feel. I will keep on going back to my filming roots next season, and hopefully someone will join me this time around. If anything it saves a lot of space on the hard drive if you can help each other to press record on the camera.
I’ve put my clips together in a little edit, and recorded some lo-fi music to go with it, and I won a prize for creativity with it the film festival at the school. It means a lot to me since it was students voting for the film they liked the best.
So here you go. My, rather long, season story accompanied by my rather slow season edit and my rather bad singing. But I wouldn’t have it any other way.
Markus