To those who are interested in trying snowboarding, allow me to explain what you are committing to. It goes a little like this: Get up, fall on your face. Get back up, fall on your butt. Get up again, and, you guessed it, fall right down again.

On my first day of snowboarding, I was with four friends and believe me, we all thought we were X Games worthy. On the bus ride we decided that lessons were a waste of our extreme talent so when we got to the mountain, we headed straight to the top.

At the summit, we looked at our choice of trails that led back to the bottom: a black diamond trail. No one wanted to admit it was too advanced for our skill level so we started down. I was in the middle of the pack and we were all moving at about the same pace as we came to the first big drop off. Once we hit that we started to cruise. Down the hill, one by one, we were hitting the ground. My fall was the hardest; I caught my toe and flew into the air as though I were Superman. Once I hit the ground, my penguin slide commenced.

After that first fall we stopped to discuss our ingenious plan of skipping lessons. By then, though, we were at the point of no return - too far down to walk back up but too scared to go down. One by one we agreed that we were just going to go straight to the bottom. We had to psyche ourselves up a bit but the plan was working out with no more painful meetings with snow and ice. The chairlift was in sight and so was a crowd of people surrounding it. At about this time, we realized we couldn’t stop. Time to think fast, or we were taking a lot of people down with us! I was surprised to see that we all could think that quickly and fall down to stop. We hit the snow with a bounce, tumble and roll.

We stopped before hitting the crowd, but it wasn’t graceful. We lifted our heads and spat out mouthfuls of snow. After looking ourselves over to make sure nothing was broken, we decided to take it down a notch and made our way over to the bunny slopes.

Our snowboarding debut could have been much worse and I’m glad that we walked away with only minor bruises. So, learn from my mistake - if you are thinking of trying snowboarding, get a teacher and stick to the easy trails. I learned the hard way that I wasn’t X Games worthy and it hurt for a few days. Be smart and sign up for a lesson.