Well… this should be a major part of this blog. After all it’s what most people out here come out for. It’s pretty hard to know what to say about it because I know how dull I found people talking to me about it before I came out. After all, I just came out to cook and get drunk right?
To be honest I learnt to ski mainly cos I knew how bored I’d be out here if I didn’t, oh, and because it was free. The first of these reasons is the only thing that kept on the slopes for the first week. I think I can safely say that I sucked… big time! Moving at a snail’s pace down a gradual incline shitting myself and then going flying (into the rest of the class most of the time was a particular specialty of mine), was really not my idea of fun.
Then when you watch other people doing it, my thoughts were not, Oh I wish I could do it like that’ but more like, ‘What a bunch of crazy bastards! Why on earth would anyone want to chuck themselves down something that looks like a cliff face at about 40 miles an hour?!??!’
The one positive thing I can say about learning to ski was that my legs NEVER hurt. This can not however be said about EVERY other muscle in my body! Spending the best part of two weeks bodily pushing myself up off the ground about 4 times an hour meant that sometimes even thinking hurt. I’m not joking! You can’t use your legs to get you up at all because there two big bastard slidey things attached to them, so you literally have to support your whole body weight with your upper body. I had pistols like boy band heart throb at one point ;-). One day I couldn’t brush my hair because my neck muscles hurt to much brace against the brush.
Luckily things changed and I am now captain speedy and loving it. In fact I can’t imagine what it will be like to come home and not ski now. I’ve not been out for about four days now because I’ve been ill and I’m already really twitchy.
It’s incredible that your perception on these things can change. A green slope that used to take me 20 minutes zig-zagging across to get down, I can now almost go straight down in about 30 seconds. I red run that I used to look up and get a lump in my throat I can now get down with no trouble. But the weirdest thing is that they actually look different gradients to me now. This is why it’s so nice to progress so far in one place because you know that even though they look like different slopes they are defiantly the ones that used to terrify you.
