“How’s your day going?” I asked looking to the person sitting to my right. We were both riding a chairlift up Whistler mountain, our cheeks slightly numb from the biting cold wind.
“Good, I guess, I haven’t got a lot of runs in today, though,” he replied.
“When did you start learning to ski?” I asked.
He shrugged his shoulders; “Emmm… only three years ago,” he said with a look of regret in his eyes.
The chairlift reached the top, the bar went up and we went our separate ways. I watched as that eight-year-old boy glided over to join the rest of the children in his group as their instructor waited patiently for them.
I smirked to myself. That kid had taken up skiing around the same time that I had, and he already felt like he was playing catch-up with his peers. How exactly should I be feeling, I thought, now that I’m in my 30s?
I and my wife, Spring, never learned how to ski when we were growing up. We weren’t part of any athletic teams in school and our parents were not the outdoorsy types.
I’m originally from Ireland, which has no ski resorts, and Spring, well, she grew up near a ski hill in Alberta but never felt the inclination to go there.
That all changed when we moved to Squamish. We got into a routine through our first summer here of being able to just head out into the wilderness when we had some time and had become accustomed to the feeling of freedom that one gets when above the world on those shining summits. But fall came and the first snows flew. We tried in vain to continue to head into the mountains but quickly learned how much extra exertion is required to wade through waist-deep snow.
We bought snowshoes and for a while they worked well and took us up many mountains, but on some occasions as we trudged back down, we’d be passed by skiers carving turns around us, spraying up rooster tails of powder snow with a grin like a Cheshire cat on their faces.
Skiing looked fun, but to our 30-year-old minds, it also looked pretty dangerous. Most sports that require an unprotected human body to travel at speeds it cannot naturally reach look dangerous to the outsider. However, we needed to progress. The fear of not at least trying to learn to ski eventually outweighed the fear of injuring ourselves while doing it.
A three-day Introduction to Skiing course was on sale at Whistler so we decided to go for it. “How difficult could it be?” we asked ourselves. Learning to snowshoe was easy and skiing seemed pretty straightforward, albeit dangerous.
Children of all ages seemed to pick it up quickly, as adults we expected to pick it up even more quickly.
This assumption, of course, was completely wrong.
Other than developing a well rounded understanding of that which is likely to injure us, something else seems to happens to us as we grow up and mature. We lose the taste for public displays of failure.
We don’t want to appear clumsy and awkward around our peers. By 30, I felt I should be on my path in life. I shouldn’t be back at square one as a complete novice, falling over, faceplanting into the snow, careening out of control down a green run while kindergarten kids carve turns around me.
“Are you ok?” the ski instructor asked as he came to a stop beside me.
“I’m as good as can be I guess.”
I’d just straight lined down a green run, trying to hold a snowplow, but at some point my legs gave out, my skis went parallel, and I at least had the sense to forcibly crash myself before I hit the lineup for the chairlift at the bottom.
That day had not been going well. I’d been the last in my group to figure anything out. Spring was having an equally hard time. Just sliding on the skis was terrifying. We had no clue what we were supposed to be doing while strapped into these planks of death.
By the third day we were at least getting down green runs, but because our bodies were beaten up from falling more times during those three days than in our entire childhoods, we didn’t ski again that year.
The following winter we decided to try again. We imagined it would be like riding a bike, that we’d have the muscle memory from our course. That didn’t happen, it took us quite a bit of time to remember the movements again.
We bought ex-rental ski gear and just kept throwing ourselves down the ski hills. We’d drive to Cypress Mountain after work and spend five hours there until 10 p.m. just running laps until our quads felt like they’d explode.
It got to a point where I legitimately felt like we were going to throw in the towel and give up on skiing altogether. The “eureka” moment when everything suddenly clicks just wasn’t happening for us.
With other sports we’d taken up since moving to Squamish, such as rock climbing and ice climbing, my usual strategy was that if I felt I was about to quit, I’d heavily invest money in equipment for that sport. This might sound foolish but it has always worked for me, so we bought backcountry ski touring setups, new boots, ski skins and fancy lightweight bindings.
I’ve learned that an easy way to rid myself of the fear of failure in an activity is to replace it with the challenge to utilize the equipment for that sport or have my investment go to waste.
Every day that we’d choose not to ski, we’d see the equipment for it in our apartment going unused. Motivated by this image, we started venturing into the backcountry last winter towards some mellower objectives when the avalanche risk was low.
As last year’s ski season came to a close I felt I finally had that eureka moment. The movements became fluid, the turns came effortlessly and I felt that grin like a Chesire cat spreading across my face as my downhill speed increased.
That eureka moment was in letting go of control. I feel we spend a lot of our lives accruing control. Stabilizing our finances, maintaining our relationships, controlling our health. As we grow older and mature we become accustomed to feeling in control. Our worlds spiral when we lose it.
I’d spent so much time trying to force my skis to turn and resist the pull of gravity that it never felt easy. It was only when I let go and accepted that gravity was actually in control and I was merely directing how it was pulling my body down the mountain that it became easy.
This is why skiing creates such joy in people. Flirting with being in control and slightly out of it is freeing.
Those brought up skiing are lucky to have been taught it when control wasn’t something they wanted or needed, but if you are 30 or older and haven’t yet been skiing then I’m not going to lie and say it was easy, but I can promise you that the effort will be worthwhile.
Ask anyone who does it and they’ll tell you, skiing is not just a sport, it’s a way of life. It’s a way of life that I hope everyone can get to experience.
