Black-And-Blue Snowboarder Can’t Get The Hang Of Aging

A bruise the size of a dinner plate didn’t deter Debbie Brodin. Neither did the whiplash in her neck or the wrist that swelled to twice its normal size.

“I thought I’d even cracked my tailbone,” she says, chuckling. “I had to let my body heal for a week, then I was back at it. I had to conquer it.”

Watching Debbie cruise down a steep hill at Silver Mountain, rocking gracefully from heels to toes, it’s hard to believe it took her a half hour just to learn to stand on her snowboard.

“I fell, I slipped, I fell. It was painful,” she says. “But I wasn’t going to quit. Why should the kids have all the fun?”

After nearly 30 years of skiing, Debbie switched to a snowboard last year. She was 43 and liked living in the sun. She in-line skated and scuba-dived, surfed and wind-surfed. Her year-round tan matched her sports.

Her daughter was 11, her sons teenagers. They were too cool for skis and convinced Debbie, who manages the Post Falls Community Pool, to put hers into hibernation.

Debbie’s fellow ski instructors at Silver Mountain jokingly warned her about “the dark side” - their term for snowboarding. “Don’t go,” they pleaded, but it was too late.

“Once I decided I’d try, I knew I wouldn’t stop until I could do (expert-only) black diamond runs,” she says.

Day 1 nearly killed her. As athletic and coordinated as she is, Debbie couldn’t keep her body over her board. She crashed so often on the hard-packed snow that a swarm of doubts drove away most of her confidence.

“I had never failed at a sport before,” she says. “I felt challenged, so I stuck with it.”

Aspirin helped. Pain pounded from joints she didn’t know existed. Her kids and Silver Mountain’s snowboard trainers encouraged her.

By the end of the day, she could coast down a beginner’s hill, turning her board from end to end.

After her soreness ebbed, Debbie strapped on the board again and accepted help from her kids. By her third try, she was hooked and began to pick up speed.

She progressed so quickly that Beau Glenn snagged her for the snowboard school he runs at Silver Mountain. Debbie passed the first-level instructor’s test just weeks after she first tried snow-boarding. She’s taught ever since.

Beau needed all the instructors he could find.

“Interest in it grows every year,” he says. “Used to be we had mostly kids in our classes, but now we teach as many adults as kids.”

Debbie is unique among snowboard instructors.

Most are half her age and in their athletic prime. Insecure middle-agers gravitate to Debbie as a comrade-in-arms, figuring she’ll understand their fear.

Debbie understands completely. Her first advice to her older students: Keep a big bottle of aspirin close.

“It gives them confidence when they see me,” she says, even though her age isn’t evident through her layers of fleece and Gore-Tex. “I tell them I’ve been through it. I know how they feel.”

Jeanette Stillinger watches wistfully as her kids leave with Debbie for their snowboard lesson. Jeanette had watched snowboarding in the Olympic Games and decided it looks easier than skiing.

It might make a good family sport and give her more time with her children, she says.

“I bounce well,” she says. “And I have a high pain threshold.”

Magic words to Debbie, who recruits every adult she can.

“When’s the last time they tried something new so they can feel their progress like kids do?” she says. “I can feel my progress and I love it.”

Her skis stay in the closet. This season, Debbie has carved waves into Silver Mountain’s intermediate slopes. She’s leaned into the hill and dragged her mittened hand along the snow. She’s even considering racing later this month.

“I haven’t skied since January 1997,” she says. “And I won’t ski again until I can board the black diamond hills with bumps.”

, DataTimes ILLUSTRATION: Color photo