Training, Preparing, and Overcoming My Fears

Despite having started skiing when I was young, I’m not a great skier. The one-week-a-year ski holidays of my youth were followed by decade-long droughts in adulthood. My daughters, on the other hand, are passionate and accomplished skiers, and we have been going to the mountains of Europe for a week or two every winter since they were small. These are always treasured times, and we are looking forward to continuing these trips for as long as we can.

We didn’t take our trip last year. I was recovering from Lyme disease, and my eldest daughter was away working as a ski instructor for the winter before starting vet school. (Yes, she is that accomplished a skier.) And so it was with some trepidation that I planned our recent trip to Obergurgl, Austria, this year.

My legs and knees had taken a big hit from the Lyme disease and 3 months of light exercise during my recovery. Last spring I began an intensive weight-bearing physiotherapy routine to rebuild them, but the stresses and strains of skiing are a far cry from leg presses in the controlled environment of a gym.

In anticipation of this ski trip’s impact on my legs and knees, a few months ago I went back to the physiotherapist who started me on the weights, and he put me on a program of using elastic bands with handles in lunges and squats. This added balancing to the significant improvement in my leg strength due to the weights. (I can now press 1½ times my body weight with both legs and 1 time my body weight with each leg.) He explained that adding balance to the routines would help strengthen all the small muscles and tendons in my legs that work in unison to keep my joints, ankles, knees, and hips strong and flexible.

The first few sessions working with the bands on my own were revelatory! I was exhausted after a very short time. It was a hard cardio workout as well! I never knew just how much these smaller muscles work at stability and balance, and just how much strengthening they needed.

Also, on the advice of a doctor whom I had seen a while ago for a torn meniscus (now healed) in my right knee, I wore knee braces to keep my knees from twisting in case I fell. With all this preparation my legs were as strong as they have ever been.

Ready or Not, Here I Come.

On the first ski day I was very nervous about what might happen. I told my daughters this. (A problem shared is a problem halved, or “thirded.”) Both my daughters told me I’d be fine. After watching me tentatively struggle through my first run, my ski instructor daughter said one thing that changed everything. “You are skiing with your upper body, turning first at the shoulders. You need to ski with your legs and hips doing the work and controlling the turns.”

Something clicked inside me, and I realized I was skiing with my head and not my body. Out of fear I was trying to think my way through this, not relying on instinct and visceral sensation to make it happen.

On the next run everything changed. I was at ease and, albeit still on the blue slope, found a level of comfort and confidence in letting my body do the work and not my brain. My knees and legs had become strong enough that I wasn’t even conscious of them as a concern; they seamlessly supported me in my efforts to experience ease, grace, and control as I kept on skiing.

Once my daughters saw that I was fine on my own, they went off to do their own version of ease, grace, and control on much harder slopes, and we made a plan to meet for lunch in a few hours in a mountain restaurant.

This went on for three days. On the fourth day I was tired and very stiff from using my body in ways it wasn’t used to. I also wasn’t doing my usual aerobics and yoga practices. I heeded my body’s call for rest and gentle yoga and stretching and took a day off. That was the tonic I needed, and I managed to ski every day after that, sometimes not for very long. My best skiing was in the morning, before lunch. I even managed a few of the harder red slopes with my newly found confidence, taking them at a speed I felt comfortable with, falling a few times with no consequences, and generally enjoying my time in the mountains a great deal.

When we returned just before Christmas I did a truthful “check-in” of the experience with myself. Being away in that rarified “top of the world” with my daughters was a great experience. Participating in the skiing as much as I did was also very satisfying. However, I missed my regular life. My daily health practices – Zone 2 and HIIT aerobics, plus eating what and when I usually do – were not possible given the amount of time we spent skiing and our stay in an Alpine hotel. I could feel a change in my body from not moving and practicing as I usually do.

The skiing and my time away from my usual routine were great, and I look forward to doing it again next year. But I also learned that this could never be a full-time diet for a healthy life. That belongs to the more comprehensive regular practice I’ve worked at building for my day-to-day life, the life right here in front of me.