NASJA 15: My NASTAR Experience (A)

A snowboarder on a ski racing course? Yep.

One common feature of the annual meeting of the National Association of Snowsports Journalists Association (NASJA) is a NASTAR event. NASTAR, which stands for the National Standards Race, is a means by which skiers (and participants are largely skiers) can assess their abilities to race.

The operations of NASTAR are all fairly complicated (see the Rules/Info page for more), but roughly speaking, an Olympic ski racer is timed on a course, and everyone else’s score is referenced against his time.

There are also adjustments for a racer’s sex and age, resulting, as in golf, in a handicap. Unlike a trip through a NASCAR course, which runs for hours, the trip down a NASTAR course will take 30 seconds. And that’s if you’re very slow. If you participate in NASTAR on a regular basis, you can track your progress over time, as the handicapping system allows you to compare your racing on Mount X in one year with your racing on Mount Y in the next year.

Each person at the annual meeting was given the opportunity to sign up for the race the day before. We were to be assigned to teams of 10 or so, which added another dimension to the event. Not only was each participant going to be stacked up with his prior performance (or in my case, setting a benchmark for future events), he would also be contributing to a team effort.

I had not thought of participating. After all, I have always thought of racing as a “ski thing.” Skiers race. Snowboarders, if they do something other than cruise, hit the terrain park or the halfpipe.

But I got talked into it. One, the organizer of the event is someone I know, a person whose enthusiasm is infectious. Two, this trip was all about learning, doing new things, and exploring the broader world of snow sports. A timed race fit right in.

I had three objectives going into the event: don’t get hurt, don’t fall, and don’t miss any gates. Happily, I met all three objectives.

More on that later.