Thing to Do #84: Learn to Ski (Part 4)

A couple of weeks ago I went skiing for the fourth year in a row. Skiing is something I had wanted to learn to do when I was younger and it was an item on the original list. The first year I suffered greatly from being sick while trying to learn. That led to a LOT of frustration. In my second year I was able to quickly pick up the little that I learned in the first year and far surpassed it, granting me great relief that something I had really wanted to like may be something I could actually do. But then last year I regressed. I told myself that if I didn’t get the hang of it this year, I was going to give it up. There wasn’t much point in spending the money and taking up vacation days with something I wasn’t enjoying.

To give it a fair shake, I signed up for a lesson the morning of my first day. I have to admit, I wasn’t the worst in my class, and that went far in making me feel at least a little better. With the help of the instructor, I was able to pinpoint some things to work on and figure out what bits were giving me the most trouble. In the end, it really was mostly that I refused to stand all the way up. I’d keep crouching, which makes me feel safer. But standing up really did make it easier to turn my hips and bend my knees.

I stayed out all day working hard on the basics but I was still pretty uncomfortable. I would still have to consciously think about every move and every turn, reminding myself to straighten up, turn my hips, lift the outer hip, bend inner knee. My toes and fingers were exhausted from being balled up into little fists of anxiety. After about 6 hours of skiing, I also realized I had a new problem with skiing: my knees. Ever since I trained for the marathon, my knees still bother me sometimes. Now that I was skiing “properly,” my knees were letting me know loud and clear that they didn’t like being bent in this new way.

When I first started out the next day I quickly realized I was in trouble. My knees immediately began hurting. But you know what happened? On steeper slopes which would have put more stress on my knees, I just said “F*ck it” and snowplowed down the mountain. And because I was choosing to do this rather than having to do this, it made me feel better. Also, in years past, even snowplowing made me feel anxious and out of control. After four years I actually can control the speed while I snowplow and would sometimes go pretty fast, knowing that I could easily slow or stop anytime I needed to. It also just gave me a break since there isn’t much energy needed to snowplow (“real” skiing definitely still feels like work) and I could unclench my toes and fingers for a bit. I mean, I would literally snowplow down this one whole trail because it’s very narrow and a little steep for my taste. And you do begin to feel the burn in the glutes and upper thighs snowplowing for a straight 10 minutes. But still worth it.

And that made all the difference in the world. Even if I wasn’t doing it “right” I at least felt comfortable. I was skiing on my own terms. I actually managed to officially relax and…dare I say it?…have fun by the afternoon of the second day. I may have even laughed. To make things even better, the weather was especially gorgeous that day. It had been quite nice the day before, all sunny and a high in the 40s. But on the second day it was so warm I was skiing in just a fleece and was actually still kinda hot. People were skiing in bikinis and tank tops and shorts so that just added to the general merriment of the day. Because it was the middle of March, the slopes were rather empty. And despite the lateness of the season, all the trails were still open, thanks to numerous winter storms’ gifts of snow over the previous two months, so conditions were ideal all around.

This is kinda stupid but I even finally got used to the equipment this year. It’s always been a huge bother getting into ski boots and schlepping skis and poles around but this year I feel like I actually got the hang of that too.