Travel skiing: A spot of tic tac, anyone?

Overcoming a prejudice against dangerous snowboarders, Stephen Wood learnt a few new tricks on the slopes

The response I offered to the snowboarder who crashed into me earlier this season in France was, I thought, fairly measured: I abused him righteously to his face and again on these pages. But it appears that, beneath their devil-may-care exterior, snowboarders are a sensitive bunch. Among the complaints I received about my comments was one from a solicitor who entered a claim for fairer treatment of snowboarders.

He is my mother's lawyer, not the French snowboarder's; and anyway I had a good defence - that my prejudice against snowboarders is restricted to those who threaten grievous bodily harm. Nevertheless I decided: if you can't berate them, join them. And after three days' training last week at St Anton in Austria, I am now a snowboarder. Just.

With some experience of boarding - one hour's tuition at the Snowdome in Tamworth a year earlier - I had an advantage over my two fellow pupils. I wasn't surprised when our instructor, Jorg, proposed we hold hands with him out on the slopes. And in the rental equipment shop I was prepared for the question "Are you regular or goofy?", although I couldn't remember the answer.

For the unprepared it's a difficult question, because the two things are not commonly regarded as alternatives: if the family doctor asked whether you were regular, the answer "No, I'm goofy" would put him on a wholly different diagnostic track. But among snowboarders, the distinction defines where you stand in relation to your board, leading either with your right foot or, more commonly, your left. The standard test for goofiness is to tell a beginner to shut his eyes, push him in the back and see which leg he uses to avoid falling. I led with my left, and was pronounced regular, as were the other two trainees - both women, one in her late 40s like me. Boards adjusted, feet fitted with soft boots (footwear so comfortable that, when I am even more elderly, I'm going to buy a pair for shuffling around the house), we set off for the first of many unsatisfactory ski- lift experiences.

Once we had reassembled ourselves from the pile of arms and legs dumped into the snow off the chair-lift, Jorg led us up to a nursery slope for Lesson One: the use of the edge. A snowboard is a simple, elemental tool; all you have to play with is your own body weight, and two steel edges. Except momentarily, when heading straight down the slope, the snowboarder is always on edge. That's less apparent with a skilled boarder, who flips from edge to edge on an almost straight descent, more so with one doing slow traverses, either facing downwards and using the heel edge to bite into the snow or facing up the slope perched on the toe edge.

Jorg had us facing both ways, balancing on our edges and then angling the board slightly to let it slip slowly down the fall line.

This was when the hand-holding started. Initially, balancing is tricky; but to have an instructor controlling your descent bolsters confidence. Soon we began doing traverses - not changing edges but simply following a zig-zag path (if Jorg is right, that's tic-tac in German) down the mountain. And by the end of the day we were already experimenting with proper turns, switching - on the flatter parts of the piste - from one edge to the other.

On the first day I made more progress than I had expected, and suffered less pain. On the second, I fell over more often than I had expected. "Fall" is too small and one-dimensional a word to convey the endless possibilities of impact (among them, I discovered, hitting the ground from a standing-stock-still position). "Landing" is a more flexible term, allowing the qualifications of "forced", "soft", and so on.

Our most dramatic crash-landings occurred, unfortunately, on drag-lifts. Their reputation for tripping up snowboarders is such that drag-lifts effectively validate the sports psychologists' technique of "visualisation", by which deep concentration on an image of a desired - or, in our case, undesired - outcome will cause it to be realised. The embarrassment of falling on a descent is one thing, but doing it even before you've got up the hill is another; it's a bit like drowning on the way to the beach. Sustained embraces with Jorg - we took turns to travel up the drag-lift with him - eventually relaxed us enough to manage the journey on our own.

Learning to turn, our agenda for day two, requires another psychological trick, that of feigned bravado. Turning off one edge involves flattening the feet and allowing the board to head straight down the hill; then, just when you feel like (a) panicking and (b) holding the instructor's hands, you have to act tough and lean forward, pressing down with your front foot so that the back foot can flick the board on to its other edge. Simple? In theory, yes; in practice, no. Jorg produced a length of rope so that we could each waltz down the slope loosely attached to him, his occasional tugs pulling our turns into shape.

Flying solo, I managed on occasion to put together a sequence of turns in what I assumed was a stylish manner; but the pride that I took in this was, inevitably, followed by a fall. On day three, Jorg tried to push us forward, introducing the emergency stop and knee-bends and stretches (to "unweight" the board) into the curriculum. But he struggled: the problem was that we still hadn't really learned day two's lesson. Only by late afternoon could I tackle a 300-metre nursery slope with some confidence that I would stay upright for its whole length - although, by the time the lift closed, I had begun to get the knack of flipping from edge to edge like a proper snowboarder.

Ever since that infamous BBC TV documentary about skiing beginners at Soll it has been standard practice to play learning winter sports for laughs, stressing the cock-ups and catastrophes. But on the morning before leaving St Anton, there was nothing comical about the way I flashed down the slopes on a few final runs, masterfully dodging errant skiers with elegant turns, all totally under control. Just joking.

To hire a private instructor from the Arlberg Ski School at St Anton costs ASch2050 (pounds 100) per person per day for three days, plus ASch180 (pounds 9) per day for each additional pupil. For further information contact the Austrian National Tourist Office, 0171-629 6146.

Stephen Wood is Executive Editor of Conde Nast Traveller