When I first started thinking about this journal entry, I thought it was going to start like this: I went skiing!!! But then I fell and probably almost broke my leg, so it’s going to start like this instead: We got up insanely early, especially for a Saturday. I know it was only like six or seven, but I think any time before eight on a Saturday is insane. Of course, that also meant that I didn’t get to stay up late because I had to at least be able to get up.
So, it was a long and vaguely scary (at the end) ride to the mountains. We (meaning my parents) had to put on chains half way up the mountain. Apparently they’ve never done that before, which made me laugh because they lived in Minnesota for a while.
Getting and carrying the skies up the hill was murder and the little hill we were on didn’t do much for me. Although I am happy to say that I’m better at skiing than I thought I would be. So, to describe the beginner’s way of skiing. If you’ve ever seen skiers you’ve probably noticed that their skis are parallel to each other. Which is true if you’re good. But if you aren’t, like me, you’re skis are (in general) in a sort of wedge.
And then when you’re on the really little hills (it doesn’t work once you get to bigger hills) the way to stop is to make that wedge bigger. As I learned once I got on a bigger hill, you have to either coast until you’re going slow enough to do the wedge (which is what I was doing most of the time) or turn sideways (which is what I was doing to stop myself when I fell over).
But let me go back to the small hill for a second. The group we were in wasn’t very good. After lunch when we came back for a second lesson, my parents and me and one other man were the only ones that the instructor let go over to the other hill. I’m going to skip lunch because it was really boring, but I will tell a couple stories. Both of my parents have been skiing before. They’ve run into each other while skiing. They’ve run into other people while skiing and once my mom couldn’t stop, fell over, didn’t turn her skis to stop herself and went over the edge of a cliff. She got really lucky because she landed right between two rocks and the guy who came down and found her thought she would be dead.
So, as I said previously, after lunch we went the larger hill. This hill was basically longer and steeper. That meant that if you didn’t want to crash into the fence at the end of the slope, you had to turn. I’d been trying to turn back on the smaller hill, but I wasn’t succeeding. Well, I found at first that I could right, but not left. Not sure why. And even by the end when I could turn both ways, I had to seriously twist my knee to be able to turn left.
Well, once I started actually turning left, I ran into a problem. I fell over. Every single time I turned left, I fell over. I never fell over when I turned right, even later, it was always and always was when I turned left. Basically, if the instructor hadn’t told me what I was doing wrong, I never would have figured it out.
Turns out I was leaning backwards when I turned left. It took me a couple tries before I could actually turn without leaning back, but once I figured it out, it made all the difference in the world.
However, this is where another problem came in. Once I actually figure out how to turn, I didn’t fall over, in general. However, when I did fall over, I could no longer just put out my skis to stop me. I kind of fell head over heels. My ski came off twice when I did that. And the second time I fell over, which was like the third or second to last run of the day, I twisted my leg really funny and it still hurts. I was at the top of the hill when I fell. That’s where I always fall because the top is a little bit steeper than the rest of the slope. My ski came off when I fell and because it was so slopped I couldn’t stand up and get the ski back on without sliding. For those of you who don’t know, you have to get all the snow off the bottom of your shoe before you put your foot in the ski. So, you can imagine how hard it was to stand on one foot on a slope and chisel snow off the bottom of your shoe.
My dad finally came to help. Another tip on skiing. To go slower, you make your turns (which should be parallel to the bottom of the slope) last longer. If you want to go faster, you go out of the turn while you’re still skiing at a decent pace. I just sort of naturally turned out of the turns while I was still moving pretty fast, so I was going pretty fast (and the faster you go the more dangerous it is to fall).
So, yeah. I love and am terrified of skiing at the same time. Because it’s a lot of fun, but those falls were really painful.
