The Facts, Just the Facts

Throughout the process of maintaining this blog I have tried to stay away from writing content about myself. Rather, I try to write about the interesting places and people I encounter in my travels through my 'endless winter'. With that perspective in mind, I've been intentionally vague about the reasons for my coming home from New Zealand early, but after several inquiries I've decided to lay out the facts.

On September 4th, on the best day of skiing of the season down in New Zealand, making turns with good friends on great terrain in waist deep snow, I badly injured my right knee. I felt and heard my ACL snap in the crash, but after some "physio" and a lot of rest in Wanaka I began to wonder whether I'd imagined it. I returned home on September 18th to expedite my medical care and found that I had been correct about the ACL and that I also sustained severe contusions (bone bruises) on my femur and tibia. To put the crash in perspective, the contusions are the result of the bones themselves twisting in the fall, so one can only imagine the torque involved. I had arthroscopic surgery on October 3rd here in Connecticut, using a piece of my quadracepts tendon to replace the torn ACL. After a week in an immobilizer, icing like crazy and unable to do even the simplest household tasks, I had the sutures removed and began the long road of rehabilitation.

My knee continues to improve daily. The focus of my rehab for now is regaining full range of motion and as of this writing I'm just about there. More importantly, I'm able to walk without crutches and sleep through the night without counting down the minutes until I can take another dose of Tylenol. The rate of atrophy in my legs is quite staggering - I've lost nearly 15 pounds in the 3 weeks since surgery, and it's not because I'm getting thinner. The long range expectations are that I'll have enough stability in the knee to ski lightly in March, but that it'll be a full 9 months before I'm back to 100%. The contusions are the more worrisome and painful aspect of the injury and they are slower to heal than the ACL, so they militate a conservative timeline. Taking the long view is key considering that I hope to continue skiing professionally and at a high level for some time.

I continue to benefit from the generosity of my parents and their care and hospitality as I recover. Without their support I'd be dusting off my degrees and making a bee-line for the nearest office. My friends at the Okemo Learning Center will be looking after me this winter, providing me with a supervisor's position so I can keep my head, if not my feet, in the game and remain with my dear friends and colleagues in Ludlow, Vermont. Nordica is standing by me as well, for which I am very grateful. In addition, I've received many very kind and flattering well-wishes from guests of mine at Okemo - I am obviously not in the ski teaching business for the money, so their appreciation serves as a wonderfully positive reinforcement for me.

I plan to continue to write in this space about skiing and living in the mountains, including some more technical ideas about our shared sport. Thanks to all of you for keeping in touch and for taking the time to read my postings. Now it's time for all of us to do the snow dance, so put on your goggles and boots, put in the ski film of your choice, and let's all dance around the living room in our pajamas.

Lesson Learned, Finally

I finally did it.

My natural skiing style, one that got me through decades of making turns successfully in both directions (for the most part) is all about strength. The task for me in my own development as a skier, like many of the guests I work with, has been to broaden my skill set and rely less on my natural strength, keeping it in reserve for when I really need to dig deep. It’s a concept that I often discuss with students – I don’t want to eliminate those aspects of someone’s skiing that are personal characteristics. The goal, rather, is to add additional skills and round out their skiing to rely less on their personal strengths while at the same time ensure that what is characteristic does not hamper efficient movements and good balance.

Often, guests make comments to me about what they may be “doing wrong” in their skiing. My response sometimes is mistaken by them for merely positive minded coaching but is in fact sincere: that it’s important to distinguish between actions that are “wrong”, inefficient, or out-of-balance, and those that are merely characteristic of personal skiing.

One familiar way to think of this mindset may be to recall Rocky Balboa. Think of Rocky learning to fight right-handed instead of southpaw in order to beat Apollo Creed. Fighting southpaw may have been great on the streets of Philly, but wouldn’t have won in the crud and crust on the backside of the mountain (to use a far-fetched mixed metaphor). Seriously, the hope is that the result of expanding the skill set available to each of us will be greater ease with a greater variety of terrain, conditions, tactics, and turn-shapes. In my case, high edge angle racing style turns simply are not a good way to spend time off piste, in bumps and powder, or doing just about anything other than skiing fast on groomed terrain or, you guessed it, racing.

It sometimes perplexes me that so many skiers who comfortably ski on a wide variety of terrain and have done so successfully for a long time have no interest in taking lessons. As a coach, I strongly believe that these are the skiers that benefit the most from personalized instruction. For them, small, simple, subtle changes in how they think about skiing, how they understand their movements and apply them in different situations can have a dramatic impact on how efficient, how strong, how balanced, how accurate and how not tiring their skiing can be. Again, it’s about expanding the tools available to each of us on the hill.

In my case, keeping my strength in reserve means becoming more supple and accurate with shaping my turns, relying less on side-cut and bending the skis. Yes, in instructor speak, this means rotary skills. For years, other pros would describe this to me as “rotate your feet”, to which my response was “if you want me to rotate my feet, call patrol first”. It took some time (and some coaches understanding of my literal nature) for me to realize that what is really intended by this common description is that I needed to better rotate both of my legs inside my hip sockets. The rotary movements are actually the femurs rotating in the hip sockets and it happens continuously in both legs throughout each turn, rotating in the direction of travel to more actively shape ski turns. It's how we control the shape and size of our turns without depending entirely on our equipment.

So, what did I finally do? What’s the point really? Well, I finally successfully twisted my feet. OK, I twisted one of my feet. Actually, I finally twisted my lower leg independent of my upper leg. Unfortunately, since this doesn’t work biomechanically, this meant destroying my ACL in the process. It’s not exactly a small price to pay for years of effort, but at least I have the next five months off snow in rehab to contemplate my success.