bobber wrote:The good thing about kiteboarding is that you can push hard or you can throttle back and take it easy. When my body feels good, I go for it. If something is hurting, I throttle back and take it easy. Seems to work for me. I'm in my 60's and have been kiting for a little over two years. I expect to be kiting in my 70's.
I do this all the time. I ride around and boost and carve and stuff then get bored so I go on a big upwinder. The load on the body during an upwind run is constant but controlled so you can go for ages. I then blast downwind, carve all the waves I checked out upwind, then do some more boosting to finish off.
A week ago I was riding in the lagoon at Lord Howe Island. I kite looped to save a messed up jump and came down hard and split the tail of my board. Rather than give up and go home to mope I spend the last hour cruising up and down inside the reef checking out the coral and turtles and looking at the view. It looked like this:
I strongly disagree with the advice to bum splash your landings. You will get knocked around far more doing that than doing a proper re-direction and landing planing. There are two secrets. One is to learn how to jump properly so that you edge and pop and fly (and not just levitate), and the other is to learn how to do small jumps using the correct technique. Most people just haul in the bar, lift their leg, then drift along bum first. That is wrong on so many levels.