I'm now on my 15th year of snowboarding, and still feel like I just started; so I really, really hope to be like Ann Peacock someday.  Right now, Ann, who's from Colorado Springs, is part of .1 percent of U.S. women over the age of 65 who snowboards.

She's used to getting weird looks in the ski lodges, and how, when she takes her board in for some tuning, the guys don't think it's her snowboard at first.

Peacock has skied since she was 12, but her life hasn't been all puppies & rainbows since then.  She entered adulthood as a single parent, working and supporting two kids, so there was hardly any time for recreation.  Later, she became a nurse and married a guy who was in the Air Force; but in 1984 her husband, Max, died from a heart attack - and she couldn't stand the silence in her house.  She had to get out and get active.

Today, Ann is either at the gym, out backpacking, or tearin' up double black diamond runs somewhere.  And she doesn't limit herself just to local resorts, or even to the U.S.  Once she was at Revelstoke, a powdery resort in British Columbia, and Snowboard Magazine later commented,

She ripped down steep lines through thick trees, at speed and with style, ibuprofen tablets rattling in her cargo pants pocket all the way down. She swore it was Viagra.

Perhaps even more entertaining are the shouts like "Hey, Momma!!!" that she hears from young guys by the droves as she approaches the bottom of another run.  For reasons like that, she has stopped considering hiding her gray hair.

 

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