Sage Wisdom

There’s a lot of ski advice out there. Too much. It’s amazing to me, as someone who has devoted my career to teaching and coaching skiing that so much of the advice out there is so bad. Seriously, a lot of the things people consider to be good advice is incredibly outdated, amazingly misunderstood, or simply just plain awful. I’m not quite sure what it is about reading back issues of ski magazines, having skied in Jackson Hole, or having a child who is a ski racer that makes people think they are qualified to give ski advice but, alas, it’s the world I inhabit.

Beyond the ski advice and concepts discussed at suburban cocktail parties (which can be downright scary), instructors themselves often fall into the vortex of hyper-complication, a close cousin of bad ski advice. This can and often does lead to the dreaded condition known as ‘paralysis by analysis’ in our guests. Obsessing about what angle our inside ankle is at the top of a turn or some minute difference between a skier’s right and left turns may be interesting to discuss among ourselves, but burdening our guests with them without proper perspective can be incredibly counterproductive. To say nothing of being completely un-fun (there’s that pesky fun thing again).

The qualification about keeping details in proper perspective is critical – when we teach in a way that enhances our students understanding in the big picture, the details of technique fall into place in a coherent way that makes it easy to teach technically without muddying the waters. Not everyone we teach is a gifted athlete, but if we communicate well, if we explain concepts in a way that our guests understand, the ‘technique’ we are teaching never devolves into “because I said so”. Throwing the book at people, hammering them with the ‘proper’ technique, and drilling them without apparent purpose or sufficient understanding in laymen’s terms is a great recipe for impressing them with our knowledge and our skill, and it also ensures that skiing and taking ski lessons becomes a chore. If we’re out to impress our guests, to prove to them how not good they are in an effort to get them to work hard at their skiing, perfect. If we want to be their guides to a lifetime of better, stronger, more exuberant skiing full of discovery and joy, perhaps the lock-step hierarchical teaching of the past is not the way forward.

None of this is news to anyone who is familiar with modern teaching of any subject, and that’s certainly true for those of us well versed in the American Teaching System of the Professional Ski Instructors of America. Still, I think it bears reminding ourselves of where our priorities lie.

With that in mind, one of our instructors here at Okemo related to me recently the best advice about skiing and ski teaching he’d ever heard. This instructor has been a fully-certified instructor since the 1950’s, he’s been everywhere, skied with some of the true greats of the sport, and is the last person to get into a detailed conversation in the locker room about technique. He’s also a bit of an alter cocker (to throw a little Yiddish at you – think Stadler and Waldorf from The Muppet Show and you’ll understand). What was the advice? It came from a trainer he had a million years ago named Bruno Juli, and it was this: never move any equipment or body part that you don’t have to, and never move anything unless you know precisely why you’re moving it. Maybe my friend is simply old enough and has seen enough change to keep things solidly in the big picture. Maybe, but it’s far more likely that the old sonofabitch is simply right.

A Bird's Eye View



SIA Stratton on-snow demo

Every job, every profession, every past-time has its own subculture, its own idiosyncrasies and oddities, and the snowsports industry is no exception. Far from it. Go deeper, take a look at the working life of ski and snowboard instructors, and things become peculiar very fast. Maybe I’m just a bit self-conscious about it, or maybe we just get a little weird. Entire conversations go on ad nauseam in The Loft about the way we articulate our ankles in our ski boots. I know ski instructors that actually comfortably use the word ‘fore-agonal’ in sentences, and in front of guests for crying out loud! Just because my particular micro-culture may have the cache value of a healthy, lifestyle-driven outdoor sport doesn’t mean that it doesn’t get a bit ridiculous at times.

One of the problems of working so hard to make a living in such a comparatively small and nuanced profession is that we often have trouble picking our heads up above the water, so to speak. I’m pretty lucky in this regard – I have a wide range of responsibilities in the industry, here at Okemo and elsewhere, so I tend to get frequent glimpses of the big picture by necessity. Among the more gratifying ways in which I’ve been exposed to another side of the business over the past eight years or so has been my relationship with Nordica, the venerable Italian ski equipment manufacturer. My role with Nordica is pretty simple – I ski on their equipment, promote the brand with guests and pros alike, liaise with our retailers and generally lend a hand when my friends at the company need it. It’s a lot of fun, the insight into the direction equipment is going and why, and how the equipment side of the business works in general is always interesting and really helps me provide a better and more complete sense of the world of skiing to my guests and to the instructors I train. This season has been particularly valuable in this regard as I’ve been working a bit with my friends at The Boot Pro, a successful specialty boot and ski retailer here in Ludlow that is a big Nordica dealer. I’ve learned a ton from them and, combined with my work with Nordica, I’ve now seen how the manufacturers look at sales, how the retailers look at sales, and how the consumers approach the whole process. As I said, at the end of the day the most important piece of all of this is that it helps me become a better and more complete ski teacher and really assists me in providing the highest level of service I can to my guests to enhance their skiing experiences. And it’s genuinely fun and a welcome change.

Speaking of fun, I recently had a day that drew together numerous aspects of my place in the ski industry all at the same time. For the first time, I attended the Ski Industry Association on snow demo at Stratton Mountain Resort here in Vermont. It’s an event that is essential for the manufacturers and for the retailers as they button up their sales for the following season. It’s a huge show, with every major ski and snowboard equipment manufacturer bringing their lineup for next year and every retailer in the Eastern US testing as many pieces of equipment as they can for three days. The schwag flies, everyone talks the talk, and it’s a non-stop equipment and schmoozing hootenanny. Totally cool and a lot of fun. I was at Stratton wearing three different hats: as a Nordica Elite Team member I needed to familiarize myself with next year’s lineup; as a Boot Pro employee I needed to ski on some of the equipment we’re looking at for our shop next year; and then in the afternoon I conducted a training clinic for Stratton’s instructors. Talk about being deep in the material. Honestly, the whole experience was a bit overwhelming and when I finally got on the hill with my clinic group in the afternoon it was almost a relief to simply get back into my comfort zone and work on skiing with ski instructors.

As a teacher, I often explain to my guests that their understanding of the big picture is essential and that we’ll dip down into the details that are important for their improvement as needed and incrementally over time. I like to make sure they are comfortable from a vantage point where they can see the curvature of the earth so that the details make sense in that big picture. For my own place in the industry, the varied exposure does just that – it helps me keep the details of my students’ skiing in perspective, helps me better understand their consumption options and decisions, and helps me guide them to a better, happier life as successful skiers. And it helps me get out of those annoying conversations in The Loft, especially when I run out of patience with people who insist on making up words like ‘fore-agonal’.

Sara and Alex from Boot Pro talking shop with Erica
from Nordica - all in the family at Stratton SIA!

Talk About The Weather

One of the funnier differences between my winters here in Vermont and my winters in Wanaka, New Zealand lies in how people look at the weather. In both places (and in the snowsports business generally), talking about the weather is not merely 'talking about the weather'. We really talk about it. It's a subject as important to us as it is to farmers trying to assess the prospects for this year's crops. Its importance goes beyond our prospects for business and good conditions. We're out in the weather, all day, every day.

In Wanaka, weather forecasts boil down to whether or not we're going to have a storm, what direction it will be coming from, and what kind of precipitation it will bring. Sitting as it does at the edge of a massive mountain range in the middle of an island in the Pacific, weather forecasting down there can take on a level of detailed speculation that can be somewhat daunting to those of us used to simpler weather patterns. Honestly, I don't have a long enough attention span to focus on all of the parameters for how the storms may or may not swirl around in the Southern Ocean and the Tasman Sea, whether they come from a direction that means it'll snow or rain, and whether they'll hit Queenstown, Wanaka, Christchurch or just pass us by. Everyone in New Zealand seems to have their favorite underground weather forecasting service, some revolutionary academic meteorologist with a website or some lunar faze forecasting service on which they depend. To me, the level of detail Kiwis like in their forecasts can leave me feeling as though I've been staring too long at a Seurat painting, unable any longer to see the picture beyond the dots. Let's just say that isobars don't really factor into our forecasts here in Vermont.

Here in Vermont, our forecasts are vastly simpler and our weather is far more complex than in New Zealand. Our weather either comes across the country up high or down low, and storms either pass right through or hit the coast and swirl back around. In New Zealand, weather forecasting doesn't really affect our days except for whether we need to dress for precip or break out the fat skis but here in Vermont, with temperature swings that can be dizzying, it affects every aspect of our daily lives. How we dress, what and how we eat, how early we need to get up in the morning to scrape the two inches of ice off of our cars, how well our cars function and how much gas we use in them, how we plan our days on the hill, what we teach to whom and how much. There are times when we'll have long discussions in the locker room at Okemo about how we're going to dress for the day – are we 'going to the weapons', mittens versus gloves, and so forth. Announcing to your friends that you're trying out a new layering system that includes a combination of merino and Capilene can be the source of a heated discussion of the benefits of pit-zips in down coats, Dermatone on the face, and whether second breakfast should be a muffin or if we should go big with a breakfast sandwich. Ski instructors can get serious applause for somehow being able to put on their uniform coat over a sleeping-bag-sized down jacket and still be able to move their arms!

This past weekend was a holiday weekend here in the USA celebrating the birthday (and the life and enormous contributions) of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. As always seems to be the case on MLK weekend, we definitely had some weather with which to contend. Last Wednesday night and all day on Thursday, we received something in the range of ten inches of new snow. On Friday morning, as another front hit us, we had freezing rain that felt like musket fire pouring down on us from a hot air balloon as we skied, but it turned to snow quickly as the front passed and we received another couple of inches of pretty dry powder. Saturday was clearly among the best days of skiing of the year, with temps in the 20's and the snow very dry and light. Sunday morning, I awoke to temps that were near ten degrees below zero Fahrenheit, with the same again on Monday morning. On neither day did the temps climb out of the single digits above zero and wind chills remained in double digits below. Then on Tuesday, it started out cold and then warmed up enough to fog us in and drop some rain on us while skiing. I feel like I've been living in a Gore-Tex test lab! Ho hum, just a typical several days here in the Green Mountains.

For those folks who have never experienced the joys of trying to start a car with a frozen engine block, I've included the video clip above. For those of you who think you've experienced cold weather, I have news for you: until you've had to pour isopropyl alcohol in your car's gas tank or you've had electrical cables hanging out of your car's grill, until you've had to cover your face while walking outside in part to prevent frostbite and in part to allow the air you breathe to warm up enough to not choke you, until you've stood in your house trying to decide which two pairs of long-Johns to wear at the same time just to go to the grocery store, and until you've had in excess of four cups of hot chocolate in one day while teaching skiing just to stay warm, you probably haven't experienced real cold.

Ok, seriously, this past weekend wasn't that cold. It was pretty cold, we did have to dress carefully and cover our skin, and we did take a lot of breaks inside with our students, but we all kept some layering system in reserve just in case. After all, once we go to the nuclear option, there's simply no going back.

Now, about that next snow storm …

A Skiing Fountain Pen

Cold smoke powder, Okemo style!

There’s an old joke among Jews that upon becoming a Bar Mitzvah, a young man announced “Today, I become a fountain pen.” There’s a lot of historical context to the joke that’s not particularly relevant to the modern, gentile world (legal adulthood and the right to sign for oneself), but its deep-seated meaning still cracks up those of us in the tribe. And not just when we’re skiing in the Catskills.

In a funny way (not funny ‘ha-ha’, more funny ‘hmmm’), I had the distinct pleasure of being involved in a series of events over the holiday week that culminated in a young man becoming a fountain pen, in the skiing sense. I taught a three hour private lesson one afternoon to a ten-year-old from New Jersey who was getting on skis for the first time – let’s just call him Chris. Before we even got started, Chris assured me that he wasn’t going to be very good and that I shouldn’t expect too much from him that day. Naturally, as an instructor, I viewed this as a challenge and told him as much. Needless to say, despite some struggles and crashes of the normal variety, Chris finished up his first ever three hours on skis by lapping our long beginner’s Magic Carpet lift and making some pretty nice wedge turns down the adjacent hill. In speaking with his somewhat overwhelmed parents afterwards, I made clear that my expectations were for him to move to the chairlift quickly the next time he skied, despite his significant fear of heights. From there, things just snowballed. On afternoon two, we moved from the carpet lift to chairlift (lots of giggling and knee slapping there when his fear quickly turned to thrill), we made a bunch of runs on the lower part of our mountain, cleaned up his balance and rounded out his turns, and generally had a grand old time. On afternoon three, with our poor snow cover so far this season limiting our terrain options, we stayed on the lower mountain and discovered how much our bodies appreciate it when our skis are parallel. Then came day four, the big one, all day together, for bragging rights and all the marbles (an expression I had to explain – I guess there is no Wii marbles game).  We practiced on easy terrain, took a deep breath, hopped on the summit quad, took in the distant views, and skied like champs from the top of the mountain on trails of ever-increasing difficulty.

This progression is nothing unusual or ground-breaking, I know, but there’s more. When we met on the morning of day four, Chris’s parents informed me that they’d given him enough money for the day to take me out for a nice lunch – also not terribly unusual. After several long runs, lunch loomed large in young Chris’s mind. Someone, something (definitely not me), had whispered the words “Kobe burger” in his ear and it stuck. Off we went. We entered Epic, the restaurant in our Solitude Day Lodge, and when we announced ourselves at the hostess stand, Chris and I conferred and agreed that given that he was buying and that he’d just spent the morning knocking ‘em dead on the big mountain, he should order only from the adults’ menu – no mac and cheese or chicken fingers for this little dude. In a very cute moment, he did apologize to me for ordering a kid size Pepsi, hoping it was OK.

We sat there for a while, chatting away like two buddies just catching up over a burger. Then he asked the waiter for the check, and it brought down the house. It could have been anywhere and we could have been anyone, and the normalcy of the two of us sitting there, ordering fancy-pants burgers off the adult menu in the middle of a ski day that involved such wonderful accomplishments as though it happened every day was just so cool, such a gift to both of us, that we spent a good chunk of the afternoon grinning like idiots.

It’s a running line of mine that we’re not making the world safe for democracy by teaching skiing and snowboarding; but sometimes, quietly, I do think we’re making the world safe for democracy by teaching skiing and snowboarding. In this case, though I don’t want to overstate the importance of our time together, I am confident that the experience of learning to ski, of getting on the lift, of succeeding in skiing from the summit, of ordering a great lunch and paying for it, like a man and not like some kid, was important to Chris for a million reasons that have nothing to do with skiing. It certainly wasn’t the first time I’ve taught a great kid how to ski and it won’t be the last. As the expression goes, this isn’t my first rodeo. At all times, skiing is a wonderful experience, and at the best of times skiing is merely a delivery mechanism for a wide range of other things, other experiences and opportunities. In this particular case with all of its circumstances, it was pretty darn cool to be there when my student became a fountain pen, a skiing fountain pen. With a big juicy Kobe burger to prove it.

A Snow-Deprived Stupor

New Year's Day sunrise, 2012

It's been an interesting season so far. A late start, some pretty dicey conditions, oddly warm weather and serious challenges for all of us in the ski business. Thanks to some good luck, a healthy dose of help from my friends and clients, and some perseverance, I managed to have had an exceptionally busy and fruitful holiday period from which I am pretty exhausted. I'll free ski a bit this week, catch up on some work, teach a little, run some staff clinics, and generally get my head together and recover. When all that happens, I'm hoping that my writer's cramp disappears and that I'll find some interesting and pithy way of sharing some of what I've been thinking about over the past month. Until then, I'm experimenting with a new way of cooking pasta sauce that demands my attention and an early bed time that is looming.

Best wishes to everyone for a healthy, happy, and exceptionally snowy 2012.

Making Snow

In more conventional neighborhoods than the one in which I live, in more conventional careers, towns, lives, having high pressure air and water cannons blasting away in the dark of night with a sound audible for a great distance would be a bad thing. My home here in Vermont is on the flank of Okemo, at an elevation just slightly above the main base area of the resort and above town, and tonight I can hear the snow guns and the compressors firing away. No, it’s not an annoyance, not even close. It’s music to my ears, and the same is true for the many people depending on our resort for their livelihood, both directly and indirectly in the many businesses in town.

Okemo has been open for the winter season since Thanksgiving Day, one week ago. Our originally scheduled opening day was on the prior weekend and it’s only due to the vigilance and dedicated hard work of our mountain operations team that we were able to open when we did and that we have been able to stay open. We’ve had a bit of rain in the last few days and temperatures here have been unseasonably warm (though in the modern world perhaps we need to consider what we mean by ‘unseasonably’, in the sense of needing to define the ‘new normal’), so the challenges for our snowmakers have not gotten lighter. Until tonight. The clouds moved out, the sun set, the temperatures dropped, the call went out, and our guys have been making a meal of it up there on the mountain.

Fire away, team! Give ‘em hell! Make as much noise as you want, fire up those compressors, and beat Mother Nature at her own game! Wile E. Coyote may have a good idea, but thankfully we’re not that desperate here at Okemo and we have a team of experts who really know how to make it happen.

Thanksgiving

While dozing off on the couch at some point nearing half-time of the Green Bay Packers / Detroit Lions football game today, I received a holiday wishes phone call from a close friend in the UK. She asked what I was doing and, when I told her, she expressed alarm that I was lounging on the couch in front of a televised football game instead of feasting. Silly Brit, how can she not have known that dozing off on the couch during a Packers / Lions game while the turkey roasts in the oven is simply one of many essential components of a successful Thanksgiving holiday?!

Okemo opened for the 2011-12 season today, finally. Given the nature of working in the snow sports industry, this means that over the next five months it'll be near impossible for me to travel to visit friends and family. As a consequence, Thanksgiving is not merely one of the few times during the year when my family gathers under one roof, but it is really the last time that I'll be able to set aside the ski boots and the thermals, and spend my time with people who genuinely don't care one bit about the technical considerations of edge angles, hip angulation, femoral rotation, and dorsiflexion. It'll be the longest stretch during which I do not have to consider my attire in terms of number and nature of layers. For these things, I am very thankful.

On a more somber note, in the midst of getting ready for the season and working to keep busy, there have been a few events in our community of Ludlow, Vermont and at Okemo Mountain Resort that have affected us deeply. Not the least of these was the tragic death this week of our friend and colleague John Donahue. "JD" was a mere 42 years old and leaves behind a wife and baby daughter. On this Thanksgiving, while so many of us are feasting and enjoying time with family and friends, my thoughts go out to JD's family. Some community efforts to help support his family are in the works now, and I'll post information about them here when more information becomes available. In the meantime, on this of all days, I am thankful for having gotten to know JD over the years and to have benefitted from his wonderful spirit. I, and many more of us who knew him better, will miss him. Rest in peace, John Donahue.

As for my family and loved ones, my friends, colleagues and clients, acquaintances, and mere passersby, I am thankful for the energy and enthusiasm you inspire in me to continue to pursue skiing, ski teaching, and ski coaching as a craft, as a passion, and as a profession. Now, having said that, let's all go skiing and riding!