“I never thought I would see one of our group on a snowboard.”

As I started riding down the mountain with my father, sister-in-law, and wife, we came across six other members of the larger group Three different couples, if I remember correctly, all in their 60s or 70s.

I had wondered how much criticism I would stir up by bringing a snowboard. You see, I’m out here not only with my father-in-law and his children, but with about 25 other people with whom he has been skiing since 1970 or so. In other words, it’s a crowd that you might expect to be anti-snowboard.

And in my five years with them, I have heard my share of anti-snowboarder comments. The most common objections are that riders travel too fast, and that they dig deep trenches in the snow that make skiing harder.

So I had not said anything during apres-ski about bringing a board with me. After all, the group disperses to the four mountains once we leave the hotel, so it’s not as if I had to tell everyone.

But when we were coming down Buttermilk today, “the truth” came out to a few of the old-school skiers. We were descending and stopped when we came across the three couples. Don, a skier in his late 70s, saw me and he said, in a deadpan voice, “My God. I never thought we would see one of our group on a snowboard.”

To make things worse, I was crouching down, reading to collapse to the ground. It’s sometimes hard to stand up on a board when you’re not moving, and this was one of those times. Don, encouraged me to “Have a seat, John.”

I sat down, and then went one better, laying on my back until it was time for us to keep moving. After all, I was beat.

After listening to them all talk for a while, it was time for us to move on. My father-in-law, went first, and someone in the crowd said I should follow him. Knowing that I was going to be the new representative of snowboarding to this group, I kept my turns relatively tight, hoping to dispel another criticism of snowboarders: that they hog the entire width of the trail.

As I kept it up, the pain in my front leg soon returned. I was emphasizing it; in fact, I was over-emphasizing it, fearful of riding too much on my toeside. (Falling backwards is bad enough. Falling on your face is worse.) But staying on my heelside edge just works the quads too much. Occasionally changing to a toeside ride provided some relief. I took my final run on a slower path, with my father-in-law, and told my wife and her sister to slam down to the bottom if they wished, for another run. I continued on with an unpleasant cycle. Ride. Feel the pain. Stop. Ride. Feel the pain. Stop.