The world is Jenny Jones’s playground and, in that sense, she’s never grown up.
She is always on the move but wouldn’t know how to simply go from A to B. It’s the spirit of a lifelong pioneer who took the road less travelled to the annals of British sporting history.
A glance at Jones’s Instagram and you find that it’s true, the slopestyler never settles. Try looking for a photo of the 41-year-old without a board, indoors, sitting still, not chasing a new high.
You’d be scrolling for a long time - it doesn’t exist.
It is that natural frisson and fearlessness that forged Jones into the 23rd Team GB athlete to win a medal at the Olympic Winter Games - and the first to do so on snow in 90 years of trying.
Through it all, she never once stopped walking and talking like the girl who grew up in Downend, just outside Bristol, to midwife Helen and retired fireman Pete.
Her earliest memories are of frolicking around the back garden, tucked up in the trailer of a tractor owned by her two brothers, in and out of the wigwam, always trying to keep up.
“We’re a family from Bristol, can’t speak any languages, love surfing, love going out for a dance, love G and Ts,” she said. “I’m pretty much your average person really.”
When Jenny was 18, her parents saw an advert for a free dry slope snowboarding lesson in nearby Churchill, Somerset. That 30-minute taster session has a lot to answer for.
“We didn’t learn a lot, we just thought it was really cool,” she remembers. “It was so fast, and kind of out of control. That was it.”
She needed no more convincing and, in 1999, managed to strongarm Filton College into arranging a week’s snowboarding in France for her and a group of fellow pupils.
Jones was single-minded but not at the exclusion of all else, her early athletic life strongly influenced by athletics and gymnastics.
When the future Olympian’s ballet teacher told Jenny’s mum she was ‘too elephant-like’, she was taken to a gym and competed in the South West Gymnastics Championships.
Having finished her A-Levels, Jones faced a difficult decision: to follow friends to university, stay in Bristol, or take a year out and see what the world of ice and snow had in store.
“I never went into snowboarding thinking I was going to be a pro snowboarder, I just wanted to go snowboarding,” she said.
“I wanted to do a year’s snowboarding before I had to go to university, and I didn’t look any further ahead than that.”
Fast forward six months and you’d find her scrubbing toilets and cooking meals as a chalet maid in Tignes, a movie scene so familiar that it barely needs painting.
After winning her Olympic medal, Jones told a reporter what she would say to those in her position, cleaning hotels to fund snowboarding.
“I’d say to them to get really good at cleaning quickly so you can get out on the snow.”
It is Jones all over - no cliches about chasing your dream, or never giving up, just West Country straight-talking.
And Jones’s odd jobs occasionally strayed even further away from the slopes—she also worked at a doughnut shop and in factories.
Helen remembers one particular day in 1999 when she couldn’t track down her daughter.
"We tried to find her at the chalet and we couldn't – she'd left," she said.
"Eventually, Pete got hold of her on the phone and asked her where she was.
“She said 'Listen, I've chucked the job in, entered a snowboarding competition and I've just won the British junior championships.' That's the first we knew."
By 2002, she was gaining sponsors, invites to big American contests and a spot on the start list for the ultimate competition: the Winter X Games.
Jones’s grand entrance didn’t go to plan—she crashed in the warm-up and spent nine months out. Enter the gruesome spectre of injury, which never truly left her side.
It was her first serious setback and was succeeded by several concussions, two broken bones in her left arm, ACL reconstruction and two knee operations.
And in a sport defined by ups and downs, it can’t be brushed out of history - as much as Jones might want to - that she spent five weeks off the snow and was struggling for speech and vision after a bad smash in Austria in the lead-up to Sochi 2014.
“Those times when you get hurt, everything is on the line because it’s your whole life and everything stops,” she said.
“No-one wants to mope about or be a moaner, but I don’t know many people who like getting injured.
“It just sucks. You might get upset, you might get annoyed, but you get on and you deal with it. I’ll look back and know I went in the direction I believed in and I didn’t, like, wuss out.
“How many people get a chance to do this?”
Jones rose above and spent the following years fighting to win back her place at the top table.
It paid off: she returned to the X Games in 2008 and made the finals, proving herself right.
Then came the spark. She took X Games gold in 2009, but the triumph was tinted in the eyes of her doubters by the absence of USA stars Jamie Anderson and Janna Meyen-Weatherby.
It fuelled Jones, who came back 12 months later and beat them both, taking X Games Europe gold that year too.
All the while, Jones saw new, younger opponents come and go. She was the oldest competitor in her Olympic final by seven years, a fact that media never failed to point out.
While her rivals took to yoga and meditation, Jones spent the evening before her final watching Downton Abbey.
“I tried to focus on myself rather than those guys,” she said. “If you keep learning tricks, you’ll stay at the top and on the competitive side of things, it’s as simple as that.
“I hope I proved that age doesn’t matter all the time.”
The Olympic Games had never been a real ambition for Jones until, in a moment of serendipity, snowboard slopestyle was added to the programme for Sochi 2014.
Qualification in Sochi was far from a formality—she hadn’t bagged one of the eight automatic spots to advance straight to the final and had to ride again, finishing third in the semi-final.
But there she was, standing at the top of the Olympic hill, with one in three UK televisions tuned in to watch her second run in the final.
Jones would repeatedly call that run ‘clean as a whistle’, her trademark big jumps combined with brilliant execution for a score of 87.25.
It led to a tortuous 45-minute wait for ten athletes to try to better her score; only two did, Anderson and Finland’s Enni Rukajärvi, giving Jones bronze.
Jones has a ‘goofy’ stance on the board, with her right foot in front, and there was more than a shade of that characteristic in her response to making British Olympic history.
“You sense the world is watching and I had to control that part of things and not let it get too much,” she said.
“I knew I was going to drop (down the leaderboard) but I didn’t know how far. I am just so happy. It was so difficult waiting. I thought I did my best run and landed it as best I could.”
A penny for Pete’s thoughts? “I need a whisky,” he joked in the finish area.
Jones’s medal moment still illuminates her life. But if it hadn’t happened, you sense she wouldn’t have done one single thing differently or bear one iota of regret.
Her eternal optimism survived her Olympic experience and carries her through life, which now sees Jones combine personalised snowboard and mindset workshops with media work.
The essence of it all is pretty simple, really.
“I just love it,” Jones says. “I love the feeling of jumping and the air time you get.
“It’s the freedom to do what you want and express yourself in different ways. That’s what snowboarding is.”