Skiing beastliness (to borrow the phrase)

I haven't blogged about skiing for a while, but I had my last lesson today so I'll tell about that. Last week was probably the low point of all 5 lessons. I hadn't been up for 2 weeks, and the substitute teacher we had didn't really push us - kept us on wedge christies rather than parallel. We were going down Holiday, which is super easy, and the left side of Gallery, which is a bit harder for like 4 turns, then the same as Holiday. My last run down Holiday felt really shaky and weird. Every time the terrain got even a bit steeper, I had difficulty. Although I've acquired the skills needed to ski perfectly fine, mentally I was being a wimp. After the lesson, the other girl in my class decided to go down the right side of Gallery, which is a blue square, but I chickened out. Looking at the top of a run when you only know wedge turns is tricky. You start out perpendicular to the slope , needing to push hard on your outside ski and basically ski against the mountain to propel yourself - everything about wedge turns is designed for caution, defensive skiing, slowing yourself down, traversing for long periods before making a turn against the slope with little momentum - in short, everything that makes a nervous-minded person (me) already nervous. So I went down the left side of Gallery, freezing before every new turn. This week I swore to myself that I would go down a blue square run today.

Thankfully, this story has a happy - one might say triumphant - ending, because today was the high point of the lessons. Now, I can parallel ski, like they do in the Olympics. I may not LOOK like they do in the Olympics - all swizz woosh fzz body swaying in perfect timing, "dynamic" parallel turns as they're called - but I can do "edging." Which means that you dig your inside edges into the snow to turn yourself around as you're facing downslope - boring stuff, but it made all the difference for me! Suddenly, the world made sense and skiing was laid out before me as a dazzling array of opportunities, except it wasn't like being stoned (or what I imagine that's like, anyway)- more like... confidence. Here's a hill which you ski DOWN. You don't traverse it and lose all momentum and courage - what good is that for a nervous beginner? You just go DOWN it!

My Holiday revelation was soon to be tested. We needed harder terrain, but Gallery was closed (I forgot to mention it was raining heavily- the Pineapple Express you know). So our teacher took us to Central Express, the high speed 4-person lift. It was a completely different kind of chairlift, for one thing - very fast, a safety bar, music playing, rests for your skis, etc. Much more comfortable. By this time, the rain had almost completely stopped.

When we got to the top we were at the top of the "mountain," and there was a sign with all the runs laid out with directions: lots of black diamonds and one blue square, Alpine. Of course, we went down Alpine. At first, I felt my usual jitters acting up. But I told myself: don't worry about turning, just point your skis and ski DOWN. And I did! The first third was quite steep. The second and third thirds felt much steeper than anything I'd done before - not because they were that much worse than the top of Gallery, but because they went on for so long. There was no time or gentle enough surfact to stop and start turns, so I just did that weird rocking parallel motion and went, went, went. My teacher was shouting things ("stand tall Emma!" but I thought she was saying "fall Emma!" and was confused), but I knew instinctively that if I stopped, I wouldn't start again. So as I passed her I yelled, "I'm not stopping!" And just skied to the bottom. Once there, I was exceedingly proud of myself looking up at what I'd done, and took some phone pictures. It's not as though the terrain was any more challenging than any standard intermediate cruiser, as they're called, and it's not as if I'm a good skier by any stretch of the imagination. But for the first time I felt that I WAS skiing, rather than just making turns, and that was awesome. Unfotrunately, my classmate had some bad luck with her skis, they both fell off at different times, and she fell down several times, so I was waiting at the bottom for a while. But no way could I have stayed and helped - I would have been useless.

After that, we went back down Holiday, and even through the terrain park, where I skied up to a jump, didn't get enough momentum, tried to turn away, and fell on my ass... Nonetheless, although I'm still nervous and sloppy, I know that next time I go skiing I'll have at least something to build on - which is a start!