While the rest of Russia was celebrating the traditional end-of-winter holiday, Maslenitsa, by indulging in butter-and-jam covered blini, the crazier people were looking for an adrenaline rush in winter extreme sports, making the most of the freezing temperatures before the snow begins to melt.

The Klinskoye Beer X-Winter 2001 Games took place on the snowy slopes of the ski-park Volen in the Moscow region last week. Volen is a great place for extreme sports, as well as for lonely men looking for a date among fit, suntanned female skiers and snowboarders. With International Women’s Day on March 8 just around the corner, I had no one to give flowers to, so I decided to visit the games to find an Aspen-style beauty for myself and see people fall in dramatic swirls for amusement. Boy, if only I’d known beforehand that things weren’t going to turn out the way I had planned.

The event featured all the popular winter sports, most of which, like snowboarding, snowmobile racing, ice-climbing and skiing, I know something about. There was a shortage of picturesque falls though, even in the snowboarding "border-cross" session, which involves four snowboarders on a narrow slope, bound to knock each other over. Definitely, these guys were too good – back on their feet in no time.

So, the snowboarding looked pretty boring until I spotted the attractive Russian female snowboarders. They seemed more hip and cheerful than the ice-climbing chicks, so I knew that I had to meet at least one of them.

Luckily, the sponsors were offering free snowboarding for journalists. I put the boots on, and they felt like the kind of shoes that astronauts wear for spacewalks: Consisting of numerous layers of cloth and plastic, with a thousand laces, they did not allow any ankle movement at all.

Finally, I found myself on the ridge of the slope alongside the other snowboarders with the board securely attached to my feet . It was easy to spot me among them, for I was wearing regular city clothes, not the normal protective gloves and ski pants. Amateur or casual pro? A good run and I would have looked like a god. But when I looked down, I knew it was a bad idea. Too late, the next second I was rushing down the slope at the speed of light.

The smooth ride didn’t last long. I fell at the first mound and continued going down in a ball of snow. The fall kind of knocked me out for a while, as things just became white and my feelings closely resembled an action scene from the movie Vertical Horizon. As I plummeted, I lost my hat, my keys and everything that was not securely attached to me. Eventually I managed to stop the slide, clutching onto the icy slope with my bare hands, which were already 100 percent numb.

Slick skiers and snowboarders swished by while I didn’t dare move, scared of starting to roll again. I realized that getting up in my NASA boots would be impossible, and I had no idea how to release them, so I started sliding down on my behind. A painful journey later, I was down at the lift base, covered with snow and ice and looking like Santa. I tried to catch the handle on the stand-up ski lift.

Snowboarding down the hill was bad enough; going up I was in for another surprise. The first jerk of the lift’s bar knocked me off my feet, still chained to the snowboard. I got up and got hold of the next lift bar with the help of a friendly lift attendant. This time I managed to stay up for five more seconds, then, sure enough, I fell again. Happily sliding back toward the attendant I saw, to my horror, another skier coming up on the next lift handle. I desperately crawled left to avoid a collision. No rest there though; as I sat up I got hit by an empty lift handle, coming back down from the top. Man, it was bad. I crawled back to the lift attendant, like a soldier in the Soviet-Finnish war.

The lift is the only route out, so the attendant suggested that I take off the snowboard, as we apparently didn’t work well together. That meant running up the hill, in NASA boots, with the board under my arm. And I was stupid enough to do it. Exhausted by the middle of the slope, I felt like I couldn’t run anymore, but knew stopping was not an option, as I would slide back. Somehow, I made it to the top where I spent about half an hour, wondering if I was alive and trying to get the snow and ice out of my underwear.

Needless to say I didn’t meet any girls, and I didn’t stick around for the X-Games Klinskoye Party Zone, a nighttime open-air disco. Instead, I was rushed home to unfreeze my underwear. No serious damage, and next time I will surely impress someone. But no more snowboarding, please.