Did you know that our brains undergo more than 100,000 chemical reactions a second and create up to 70,000 thoughts a day? That is, literally, mind-blowing. No wonder we sometimes find life hard, with all those thoughts and opinions flying through our heads. We stumble through our existence, doing our best with the tools we’ve been given, trying to find purpose on this ball of rock hurtling through the cosmos. If, like us, your purpose became sliding sideways down snow as much as possible, welcome! You have arrived at your safe space. Thank you for sharing this journey with us.
Now that we are in our safe space, it would be interesting to discuss the thoughts swirling through people’s heads during a street trip, specifically a street trip I went on with some fellow Vans riders. Spending a couple of weeks in close proximity with friends, doing scary things, never having a day off, and trying to avoid the authorities, inevitably leads to some wild thought patterns. I thought I would need some help getting different perspectives on these thoughts, so I reached out to my fellow thinkers to hear their thoughts on our voyage. These thoughts, whether good, bad, light or intense, were always expressed with laughter and love, two essential things to stay afloat in this wild adventure we call living.
WORDS: JOE SIMPSON, HRUND HANNAH THOR, LIVIA TANNO, JAKE SIMPSON, MATT GEORGES
PHOTOS: MATT GEORGES, JAMES NORTH, JAKE SIMPSON
Sometime in September 2024, Hrund Hannah Thor (Hrundi) called us (Jake & Joe Simpson) about an amazing opportunity for a good time and an impactful project: Vans wanted her to be the focus of a video (that we ended up naming “You Made My Day”) and she thought of us to be involved as riders, producers, and directors. A big opportunity for Jake and me, a giant step up for Hrundi, and a lot of trust in all of us to think up something cool. My first thought was, “Hell yes, thank you so much, where do I sign?”. My second thought was, “That sounds like a lot of pressure.” Even though creating street snowboard videos has become our bread and butter, the thought of it being fully backed by Vans brought on a whole new level of pressure somehow. This pressure was mostly coming from within myself, as the people at Vans were nothing but supportive.
This project evolved into a seventeen-day trip to Oslo, booked for January 2025, with Livia Tanno joining the team as a rider, and not one, but two class-act photographers jumping on for the ride: James North and Matt Georges, both of them joining us at different times. January arrived, and Europe was experiencing its worst winter in a decade. Despite being very aware that there’s nothing we can do about the weather situation, I still had irrational thoughts about making the right decisions. The lead-up to a trip makes me feel anxious until those flights are booked, calming my thoughts down. This time, those anxieties peaked more than usual, but once we landed, picked up our dodgy rental car, and drove off into the glorious Oslo sunset, I knew we were going to be alright. Why? Within ten minutes, we were all discussing the pressure we were feeling and encouraging each other with supportive words. Hrundi, for example, was feeling the pressure in her own way:
“I was coming from an injury that healed perfectly, but left a lingering fear that had me struggling to trust my body again. With that and the new level of seriousness that came with a big project like Vans, I started having anxiety about whether I was good enough or if I deserved this opportunity. At the same time, there were so many amazing individuals out there who also earned this. Thankfully, I was surrounded by the best gang ever, so I could be open about this, and it helped a lot.”
It turned out we were all having the same thoughts, peppered with our own flavour of anxieties, each requiring our own recipe of “boosting each other up”. These conversations continued throughout the trip, helping to keep everyone firmly grounded in the present. Having these thoughts is part of being human. We create scenarios in our heads of future events, without having all the information required to make a sound judgment. This is when having a good network around you is essential. As Hrundi said, she could be honest and open about how she was feeling, allowing herself to hear different thoughts on a situation, giving her more information to handle it, and providing her with the tools to act accordingly. Who you surround yourself with, on a street trip or in life, is essential. Livia, who maybe didn’t know what to expect from this group of people, had this to say:
“You never know what you’re getting yourself into, going on a trip with people you don’t know that well. I’ve experienced that situation a couple of times in the past year, and I’ve noticed that people can be on very different paces during a trip. It’s cool to see how others approach things and to learn all the little tricks they use to make stuff work. Everyone was really motivated to make the trip as good as possible. I felt like we had a good balance between joking around and getting shit done. It was definitely one of the more energetic crews I’ve been with. Everyone was really supportive of each other, and when we got a clip, it really felt like a win for the team.”
Livia is twenty-two, didn’t know us all that well, and turned up with a quiet self-confidence that could be easily confused with shyness. A few days in, I realised that this person knows exactly what she wants from snowboarding, and is out to get it. Meeting a young woman who was so strong and steady with her opinions really warmed my heart. Seeing the women’s scene thrive is magnificent. It shows that, even though we have a long, long, LONG way to go, at least we’re heading in the right direction. Hrundi and I had quite a few discussions on this topic, putting the world to rights in between pushing landings and take-offs:
“I think it’s a very beautiful thing that women are getting more coverage and more opportunities, so we can prove to people and show our upcoming generations that women are more than capable. You can see the level of riding rise, and it’s the most insane thing ever to witness. It’s getting less of the ‘oh we need a girl on the team just cause she’s a girl,’ and more of the ‘damn you are sick and we want you to be a part of our team.’ That’s what I think is so important: making women feel like they are there because of who they are and their riding. There’s definitely some progress that needs to be made, but I’ve seen big improvements, and you can see that more girls and women are getting involved. We aren’t little fragile beings, we are a damn force of nature.”
Damn-fuckin’-right. “A rising tide lifts all boats”, as they say. More women being inspired to snowboard means more people snowboarding, means a bigger community, means more things happening in the community, and so on. We all want that, right?
Considering that what we do is so inconsequential to the betterment of humankind (some may argue the opposite, I’m sure), we certainly have some pretty strong rules to adhere to. You can choose to follow or break any of these rules, but the community will let you know its thoughts pretty quickly if you do. Even if what we do is quite silly, as Jake thinks:
“Having so many dedicated people creates these community guidelines we follow for street snowboarding. It’s important to be aware of them, but also be prepared to break them; otherwise, there will be no evolution in our creative space. It’s up to you to decide which ones you want to break. Of course, from the outside it looks very silly (losing our minds trying to get to the end of handrails) and it very much is, but so many people dedicated their whole lives to it, which makes it a very special kind of silly in my eyes.”
The ABD (Already Been Done), for example, is a big deal in snowboarding. If you’re not familiar with that term, let me explain. It is frowned upon to do something that has “Already Been Done” on a spot. If you delve deeper, you realise this means that everyone has to have watched every video and remembered every spot, as well as what has been done on each spot. This is an impossible task, yet the rule still stands. I currently have a dilemma regarding this video. I found a spot that we thought someone might have already done, because it was in a pretty obvious area. We did some research and hit some friends up, but no one had an answer for us, so I decided to ride it a few days later. I had the usual 60-plus try battle, got the clip, and an hour later received a message from a friend saying, “Oh yeah, that one, I hit that like ten years ago, did a 50 on it, have fun though!”.
Now I have a million thoughts shooting through my head. What do I do with that clip? I am really happy with it, it was scary, it took ages, and Northy took a sick picture (as seen here). However, we now know that someone did it ages ago. The person who did it is one of my favourite riders of all time, and my go-to DIYX dance partner, Len Jorgensen. He is regular, I am goofy. He didn’t care that I had also ridden it. Will I use this clip? Should it be an ode to him? I don’t know yet, but what I do know, as I write this down, is that it brings all those thoughts of impostor syndrome and anxiety crashing back down, even though it was months ago and it really shouldn’t matter. Another glimpse into 1 of the 70,000 daily thoughts blasting through the space between my ears during that trip. If you’re not careful, you can get lost in those silly rules, and learning to navigate them on the fly can be challenging. So, again, having people around you to help with those scenarios is a big plus. Hrundi put it well:
“Well, usually I just want to have fun with my friends! It can definitely get tough out there battling spots or your mind, shovelling hours on end, and for that, it’s important to have good people around you. I like to have people around me who can have a good laugh at our slams and at our mistakes. A good slam is a clip anyways... It’s a beautiful privilege to get to go on trips! It can definitely push you to the end of your wits, so you gotta get a bit of silliness in there as well to level things out.”
I wholeheartedly agree with Hrundi: get out there, have fun with your friends, and overcome all these toxic thoughts. The only way to learn where your boundaries are and then push them is by going out and pushing them, without overthinking too much. Some people, out in the real world, don’t understand that we are learning where our boundaries are. And I don’t blame them. We often overstep their boundaries in the process of finding ours. What I mean is, we tend to piss people off when we try to snowboard in places we think we shouldn’t. Some people are understanding, some people get a bit upset but can be reasoned with, and some people go bat-shit-crazy. And I don’t blame them. We do get in people’s way, we won’t be able to speak their language, and we do most things without asking if we can. It does mean we have a lot of funny interactions, though. Jake shared a great one he had with Matt:
“This lady was really not happy about us riding a rail next to her apartment, she started screaming at us before we could say a word. Matt had some words to share with her. Not the calmest words, but truthful ones. She told us to get a real job and pay our taxes, and this tipped Matt over the edge. She definitely got a truth bomb dropped on her from the annoyed French man. *laughs*”
I can understand her point of view, but surely we should all take a moment to think and be able to talk to each other calmly and figure out a solution that works for everyone… or maybe not. After that interaction, a man came to find Hrundi and me. He stood very close to my face and seemed on the verge of headbutting me. He was looking for an excuse to kick off. I try to keep my thoughts relatively calm during these interactions, because it can be easy to join people on their level and make a situation worse. I had no issue not escalating with this guy, though; he was terrifying. We got out of there after that. You can’t help but think you’ve wasted time in those situations. We had something very cool lined up, spent 3 hours shoveling to get it ready, and had to clear up after ourselves without even turning the cameras on. That’s what it’s all about, though. Conquering those thoughts of giving up, and pushing through onto the next thing, forever onwards!
Well, there you have it. Probably 0.0000001 percent of the thoughts that went through our heads in Oslo. It shows me how important it is to go outside and create things with your friends. Success or failure, you will always learn something about yourself and one another in the process, and that is what life is about, right? Growing into something bigger than we were before. And as those hundreds of thousands of chemical reactions keep blasting away in our brains, I leave you with one more thought from Hrundi, about what snowboarding means to her:
“Snowboarding is kinda like life, it’s something you want to be in control of but when you try too hard your mojo goes off and you eat shit! It’s so many things... It’s a lesson in everything, it’s the people that you get to meet and the experiences you’d never get without it.”
Watch "You Made My Day" here