Hey man, don’t call last run!
Superstition. For the past 5 months, I have been working around many superstitious people. I thought superstition was put in the grave along with the Salem Witch Trials. Apparently not, so lets bury it now.
In the skiing and snowboarding community, calling ‘last run’ is taboo. If even the words ‘one more’ leak out of a rider’s mouth, he/she is quickly corrected by other riders in the group. Often a few stories of last run injuries follow and everyone agrees that saying ‘last run’ must be bad luck.
While I do not believe that calling ‘last run’ is bad luck, I think a study of skiing injuries would show a slightly higher rate of injury on the last run among advanced riders. I distinguish advanced riders because many of the following factors do not apply to beginner riders. If you are really focused on making it down the hill, you cannot day dream about dinner while you are riding, for example.
- Placebo Effect
- Physical and Mental Fatigue
- Waning Focus and Rushing
- Change in Conditions
The placebo effect can work in a negative manner as well. If you think you are more likely to be injured because you had called ‘last run’, you probably will be.
This applies to advanced riders. Anyone who is riding fast or performing technical skills while on the hill. As the day progresses, an athlete’s muscles and mental status are becoming tired. As the time spent riding per day increases, so will the likeliness of a mistake and also injury. This makes the last run most dangerous.
Sometimes riders will rush their last run to fit one last run into the day. Others may take a last run and find themselves daydreaming about dinner or the hot tub later that night. A focus relapse and rushing can both lead to mistakes and injury. More in depth:
A reduction in focus can occur for a number of reasons on the hill and some riders are at greater risk than others. For experienced park riders, riding down the hill is performed with the objective of arriving at a park full of jumps and jibs. Some resorts have parks spread throughout the mountain making for a dangerous situation. Many park riders find this park-to-park riding less exhilarating then riding over features in the park. Therefore, I would imagine that a scan of brain activity of park riders on a normal slope would show less activity than a scan of brain activity of park riders in the park. What does that mean? When park riders are outside of the park they are not paying as much attention as they would in the park. This is probably also true for snowboarder cross, ski racing, arial skiers ect. Hence the danger of waning focus.
Often riders will leave the mountain due to degrading snow and/or weather conditions. Poor conditions are often dangerous for a rider. Some definitions of poor conditions are subjective but applicable to the type of rider. A heavy snow is dangerous for a beginner rider who may have trouble maneuvering in the snow while ‘bullet proof’, or a hard sun baked snow surface is ubiquitously dangerous among skill levels. If the conditions are poor, the rider does not decide to leave until he/she experiences these conditions, which usually requires riding down the hill.
The snow conditions also change at the end of the day. Snowpack becomes harder as the sun sets on sunny days. This causes a change of speed, increased impact and less forgiveness in the conditions of the snow. All of these have an easy correlation to an increase in falls and injuries.
While all of these factors may contribute to last run injuries, calling ‘last run’ should not. The placebo effect could be quoted as proof that calling ‘last run’ increases the risk of injury, but that would rely on the participant to believe it to be true. Therefore, saying ‘last run’ does not directly cause a person to be injured. Thanks for reading, and I’ll see y’all out there on your ‘last run’!
*This is not a scientific article but merely the (respectable) opinion of yours truly*
