Hydrolife Canada February/March 2017

feature
HL: Do you feel smoking pot gave you a
competitive advantage in your racing days?
R: I do, but I wasn’t using it during competition
or anything like that. A lot of these events were
international. For one, it was kind of hard to
find at the time; you had to know a few people
or whatever. In the off-season when I was
training, that was the beginning of me learning
about how I could use cannabis to improve my
performance during the winter. While I was
doing my dry land training during the summer,
for me, it was about my motivation at first. Like
when I first started competing on the World Cup
Tour in ’91, it was just pure adrenaline. I couldn’t
believe I was on the tour, you know? When I
first got accepted into it, I couldn’t believe we
were going to live in Austria and I was going
to do the tour that all my idols that I followed
in all the snowboard mags in those days [did].
I was going to do the same thing; I was going
to be competing against them. So, for the first
couple of years, it was all good and fine, and
then after a while, it turned into, ‘Holy crap, I’m
never home.’ It’s hard to keep the motivation up
when you have to work out two and a half hours
a day at the gym, five days a week. So, over time,
I found that if I smoked some cannabis in the
morning before I would go to the gym, I would
feel so much more enthusiastic about it. Yeah,
the motivation that you need to go and pound
out the workout and go and do the 100-km bike
ride—cannabis really got me out on a regular
basis. By the time the winter came, I really had
a good foundation of training and cardio and
power under my belt. So, that’s how I first started
using, and, of course, it was introduced to me
through other people, older people, that were on
my team who came from a different era, when
snowboarding was more edgy. But these guys
were smoking dope on the trip! I couldn’t believe
it! That was astounding to me, that they would
smoke dope on the chair and then rip a cord, and
it just never even occurred to me to ever do that. I
tried it a couple times during training and it totally
put me through a different level of feeling my
equipment working underneath me and how my
feet were positioned on the board and whether or
not my board was running fast. Before it was more
like, ‘Ahh! Get to the finish line; I’m just going to
power through the whole thing,’ and my equipment
just kind of followed me. But after I started using
cannabis and riding, it gave me much more interest
in where I wanted my gear to be, how I wanted my
boots set up. All kinds of different things like how
sharp my edges were or if they were too sharp or
not sharp enough. So, that kind of gave me more
insight to set up my equipment in a different way;
I was more comfortable. So, basically that’s how it
started and that was early on in the ‘90s. I never did
compete and use cannabis the same time.
HL: Do you feel that for you or many athletes
today—like NFL players, ultra marathoners, even
current medalists—pot is a performance enhancer?
R: Like I said, it has a lot to do with your training.
If you smoke a joint, you’re not going to necessarily
sprint 100 meters faster. I don’t think it would slow
you down from your normal speed. But I think
what it does is when you’re doing your training,
[it helps] the motivation that you get to do your
training in the first place. Here’s the thing: you end
up being stronger, faster, and higher, maybe. But,
that’s basically where you get the performance
62
grow. heal. live. enjoy.
myhydrolife.ca