The Elephant in the Gondola

Some of our industry's newest instructors honing their craft with me this past weekend. The future is definitely bright!

I’ve been in countless conversations, presentations, and strategy meetings over the years about demographic groups who are underrepresented in the skiing and riding public and, not coincidentally, our instructor corps. Young new mothers, urban DINK’s (“double income, no kids”), new empty-nesters, and others. Usually the barriers to entry involve cost, travel logistics, competition from other forms of recreation, difficulty of obtaining the right the equipment, bad weather … nothing too difficult to imagine, even for those of us committed to skiing and snowboarding. Never have I been in a serious, official industry or resort conversation about the white-ness of our staff and our guests or, notably, whether the barriers to diversifying our instructor corps and our guest makeup might include institutional racism. Not once.

Generally speaking, those of us who choose to be ski or snowboard instructors are an open-minded, inclusive and welcoming group – ‘lower case L liberal’, so to speak. We talk very specifically here in America about taking our guests as we find them and modifying our teaching, our expectations, our language, activities, pacing, and every other aspect of our work to who our guests are, each one of them. The overwhelming majority of my peers around the industry would be upset to find racial bias in their ranks and it would offend their well-engrained principles as teachers. And then, just as automatically, many of them all across the nation and the world will say something pre-judgmental or worse about “Asian” people. It blows me away, it happens all the time, it’s the ‘elephant in the room’ (or in the gondola), and I've had enough.

Most of the ski people who say racist things about "Asians" think they mean it in non-discriminatory fashion. Chinese, Korean, Indian, Bangladeshi, Vietnamese, Japanese, … immigrants, tourists, native born Americans or Kiwis, it doesn’t matter who they are or where they are from, if they’re ethnically or nationally Asian, they suffer from a very specific type of pre-judgement by ski and snowboard pros who should know better. The comments range from the modest eye-roll to blatant bigotry. I once benched a senior member of my staff for complaining about having to teach a beginner lesson for the “Pakistani air force” when heading outside to teach an American family of Chinese descent, and I had to explain myself to an incredulous instructor corps when I did. I actually once had an otherwise good pro explain to me in pseudo-scientific terms why the diet in certain cultures makes them less likely to succeed on skis; and when confronted with the lunacy of it he went to plan B and explained something about the presence of diphtheria in rural India … and his guests were from Connecticut! Confront these same pros and they’ll insist that their view is based upon empirical experience and they’ll invariably defend themselves by saying something about their experience with Asians’ lack of athletic skill or fitness. Unfortunately, without a complete sociological analysis I have only anecdotal experience to rely on in drawing my conclusions about anti-Asian racism in the ski industry, but please take me at my word: this type of bigotry is remarkably prevalent; I hear it frequently.

When I do encounter this sort of bigotry, I have three tiers of response. First, I ask what sort of "Asians" the pro is describing. I’ll say something about how many billions of people live in or come from Asia and how many thousands of ethnic groups are indigenous to Asia, and I’ll ask them to be specific about which ones he or she is generalizing. Second, if they persist, we can dig deeper into the specific nature of their bias. Are they aware of essential place cricket has in modern India? Of the burgeoning middle class in China and the explosion of skiing there? Of the multiple winter Olympics in Japan and Korea and the very large and well-entrenched recreational ski industries in those countries? Of the Asian descended athletes representing our own country on the world stage in winter sports? Usually they get the hint and clam up, but not always. My third tier and last resort with unrelenting bigots is to say something about how the Asian immigrant citizens here in the USA and in New Zealand who are busy studying their tails off and plotting their swift rise through our merit-based economies will insist that the large conglomerates acquiring major ski resorts by the bucket-load immediately fire all bigots with extreme prejudice. Pun intended.

I am hopeful. Very hopeful. After all, my own ethnic group is widely perceived as being un-athletic. Though our well-worn comeback is that we’ve been too busy studying and working hard, there’s hardly a Jew in America who can’t quickly bring Hammerin’ Hank Greenberg or Sandy Koufax into a conversation quickly when facing such bias. Though we’re pretty good at making fun of ourselves, it’s only partly to be funny when we wonder if any professional athlete with an even remotely Jewish sounding name is in the tribe (“Just imagine, a Jewish quarterback!"). When Jews encounter each other in the ski business, we do quietly enjoy the moment even if we’re just joking about finding a decent sandwich (you know who you are, Wes and Aidan). Although I regularly hear offensive comments about some of the Orthodox Jewish groups of families who vacation in Vermont while the yeshivas are on break and I have myself been on the receiving end of some pretty offensive anti-semitism in my own workplace, I’ve rarely encountered surprise from other pros at my level of skill as an athlete ‘despite’ my being a Jew. My own experience in this regard gives me confidence that as more recent immigrant groups achieve their own American dreams and enter the middle class in increasing numbers, skiing and snowboarding (and vacationing in our mountain resorts) will become a more common activity for our Asian immigrant and Asian descended citizens. The question is whether they will feel welcome when they do, but the practical reality is that economics will rule the day – a dollar is a dollar, regardless of who spends it. Hope for the future indeed.

To be clear: though the focus of my ire here is anti-Asian bigotry, endemic racial bigotry in skiing isn’t limited just to them. Our resorts may not be a perfect miniature reflection of society generally, but we are not immune from the ills of the world around us. Still, I do honestly believe that the snowsports business and those of us who choose to make our careers in it does represent a pretty inspirational, intelligent, welcoming, and open-minded slice of humanity when compared to most of the Western world.

In addition to teaching skiing to the general public, I’ve been busy for the last few weeks running instructor training clinics here in Vermont, to both experienced staff and new instructors as well. As trainers, we always weave through our clinics the bedrock principles of our guest-centered teaching model, and I do often include the idea that this should include an open and welcoming mind to all stripes of people. Turning the lens on ourselves and our own conduct from time to time is one of the things that makes great instructors successful, after all, so even posing the question about whether we’re taking people as we find them without bias has real value. Ultimately, how deeply that analysis and those lessons affect our word view is up to each of us as individuals, but I do hope that I’m having a positive impact.

As a society and as an industry, we have a long way to go and many problems yet to solve. But the mountains where we play do not themselves discriminate, and the joys of sliding on snow are universal. Sometimes, to make progress we just need to talk about the elephant that’s in the gondola with us, and express our gratitude for the strength of the steel cable to can bear its weight, and hope they can offload at the summit.

We Instructors Are Different

A young student takes in his first view from the top of Highland Bowl

Imagine a small group of smart, dedicated and hard-working professionals. Imagine that each and every one of them, regardless of seniority, regularly spends a significant amount of time and effort learning, training and working in order to get better at what they do. The most successful among them achieve a modest degree of notoriety within their profession and their industry but most toil in anonymity, and most of them are able to have a life-style that is the envy of even the most successful of people. Not so tough to imagine. Then tweak the picture: remove from this group all profit motive and consider that only the rarest of them actually makes what would be considered a good living. And yet they are happy, passionate people who are unrelenting in their enthusiasm. Yes, that’s us, ski and snowboard instructors, and we definitely are different.

There really aren’t any other professions with similar dynamics. We often look to the golf industry and the role of golf pros as a point of reference, but our workaday lives are vastly different. Tennis pros? Not even close. We’re not coaches, exactly, although those of us who are instructor trainers do a lot of coaching and there are many among us who work as instructors and coach athletes in the competitive disciplines of our sports. What makes us most different from all of those other sports professionals is that we never have a score as an indicator of how successful our students are and, most importantly, we make every turn with our guests. Let’s be clear, when we are skilled and conscientious about our work, we make every single turn with our guests, and that changes everything. There is no way to successfully teach skiing or snowboarding while standing on the sidelines.

Skiing and riding in concert with our guests means that we always are in the spotlight for our athletic performance. Older, accomplished instructors whose ski and snowboard performance isn’t what it used to be nonetheless still need to be able to demonstrate effective movements and ski and board performance. I am certainly very fortunate to know a broad array of pros who continue to be effective and successful instructors well into their seventies and even eighties – they’re a genuine inspiration. Still, it means that we all work to constantly improve and there is far more pressure on our athletic performance than on our peers in other recreational sports. There certainly are an unfortunate number of ski and snowboard pros who are exceptional athletes and who have a decent amount of knowledge but whose actual teaching skills are mediocre and yet who manage to succeed anyway. Actual teaching skills are challenging to train and to assess, and many of the most gifted, teachers can be a little uncomfortable talking dispassionately about what makes them so good at what they do because doing so can feel somehow forced or insincere.

The Professional Ski Instructors of America (PSIA) and the American Association of Snowboard Instructors (AASI) (we’re all one organization, for the uninitiated) recently published a new manual that has as its aim delineating the teaching, communication, and social skills and tactics of great snow sports teachers and codifying them in a way that allows each of us to learn and improve. Creating a manual for such “soft skills” must have been a challenging process and at times, as noted, a little uncomfortable. The authors did a commendable job but, for me, simply posing the question of what makes a great teacher and continually asking ourselves how we are doing as teachers is more valuable than any specific answer or evaluation we may find.

A consistent refrain we hear from instructors who are training for their certification exams (or from our best or most ambitious members pursuing ambitions within PSIA and AASI) is that we all wish that our evaluators could simply hide in the woods unbeknownst to us while we go about our work as instructors. Man, that would be terrific! It always reminds me of something the head of food and beverage at Sugarbush said at a dinner party once (you know who you are, Gerry): when a guest was bragging to us about what a great chef she was and how her friends always love her food, he suggested that if she really wanted an honest opinion she should go out and find perfect strangers, charge them $50 for a meal, and then ask them what they thought. The point is that while certification and position are important benchmarks for instructors, it’s vitally important to never confuse status with merit. The response from, progress made by, and success of our guests is the only truly meaningful indicator of the skills of an instructor (interestingly for me, the same is true of managers and the work of their staffs, but that’s a post for another day). Please don't misunderstand me: I have ambitions within the profession and the industry that are vitally important for me, but they are merely benchmarks on the path of ever-improving ski teaching.

Ultimately, no ski or snowboard pro ever falls in love with our work because their staff trainer, Examiner, or supervisor says something nice to them. We love our work when our guests fall ever more in love with skiing – it validates our choice to pursue this career and reminds us all over again why we just can’t get enough of our sports. When our managers and the people driving our instructor organizations recognize our excellent work it’s the icing on the cake, but just the icing.

I’ve got my feet up and out of boots today on a much needed day off, but tomorrow I may have to make some turns for myself in the spring Colorado sunshine just in case I forget how totally awesome it can be. And if you’re hiding in the woods nearby, you just might catch me grinning like someone without any pressure or a care in the world.

Albert Einstein and Mikaela Shiffrin Walk Into a Bar ...

Mount Snow Resort last week as a storm cleared

I do not know whether Einstein imagined snow-capped mountains while gazing out of the windows in the Bern office where he worked as a patent clerk but I like to think that he did. We do know he was a romantic. We also know that he developed his theory of special relativity while riding the Swiss capital’s trams to-and-from work. Those facts we do know give me confidence that while riding the trams he did ponder the Swiss Alps, and chocolate, and melted cheese … in between watching other trams go by in a way that got him thinking about the speed of light and the time space continuum.

As usual, this begs the question: What on earth does any this have to do with ski teaching, exactly? As odd and incongruous as it sounds, I’ve been thinking about Einstein’s theory of special relativity, time dilation, athletic performance, ski teaching, and Mikaela Shiffrin lately. Please, work with me here, there’s an everyday point to make for those of us who teach and coach. And it doesn’t require that we hold an atomic clock inside a ship travelling around the universe at the speed of light while an identical clock stays in a fixed position on the earth. Huh? Work with me.

In a general sense, when Einstein first postulated what became his theory of special relativity, he was the first scientist to propose that time was not constant. He explained it to his friends who weren’t physicists in a romantic way: languid summer evenings seem to move slowly and last forever while some days, weeks or even decades go by in a flash (I imagine him hearing every single tick of the clock on the wall of the patent office, moving at a snail’s pace until the work-day ended). The simplest explanation of his ground-breaking theory didn’t eventually involve a cold glass of gewürztraminer and a ripe pear al fresco as the summer sun set. His theory of special relativity does hold that time would pass slower inside of a train that moved around the universe at the speed of light than it would in a fixed place on the earth. Since then, scientists have been able to prove Einstein correct: a good glass of gewürztraminer does slow down a summer sunset and, in actual fact, time does pass slower within objects less affected by gravity by means of their motion or their distance from a gravitational force. The point for us is that we know that time is not constant, and when it slows scientists refer to the phenomenon as “time dilation”.

At the FIS Alpine World Championships women’s slalom race this coming Saturday, the turns made by the top athletes will last about a tenth of a second. Within that tenth of a second, the better athletes will make corrections, adjust their technique, change their tactics, think about the turns ahead, wonder what they’ll have for lunch, and some athletes, the best athletes, will be patient and unhurried. In my mind, what distinguishes American ski racing wunderkind Mikaela Shiffrin’s astonishing performances in slalom is that she is extraordinarily patient inside that tenth of a second. Shiffrin is taking time to smell the roses and be aware of all the little sensations and nuances of her movements and her equipment while the rest of us see only a blur and hear the slap-slap of the “disco sticks” as she disregards them on her path to victory. It’s truly amazing; what Shiffrin is accomplishing right now in ski racing in rare in any sport, and it’s very beautiful to watch.

I don’t actually believe that time moves slower for Shiffrin than for the rest of us, but I do think that it feels slower to her than for lesser athletes. I do think that her intensely focused training allows her to be more present, more situationally aware, and more attuned to her performance in the moment, every moment, in a way that fills that tenth of a second with enough awareness that it’s as though time slows down. We hear this from elite athletes generally, that everything seems to slow down when they’re in the zone, and there’s something we can take away from that as ski instructors.

A focus of instructor training here in the Eastern USA continues to be replacing antiquated styles of teaching that involve verbally explaining to our guests what to do and then setting off to try to do it as explained. As trainers, we’re working to replace that cerebral-first focus with a sensations-driven one: we use activities or concepts to guide our guests’ awareness of the sensations of skiing, good and bad. The goal is to get skiers of all levels to feel whatever piece of the skiing puzzle we’d like to highlight for them as a means of developing their (and our) skiing skills, whether it be specific sensations of the body or of the performance of their equipment. Their awareness is the key.

Interestingly, modern neuroscience clearly tells us that movements are far better trained by establishing neuropathways from the extremities up to our brains than by trying to send instructions from our brains to our extremities. Imagine if Mikaela Shiffrin had to see a selfie while mid-turn, identify a needed adjustment, send the information from her brain to her foot, move her foot to change her boot and through her boot her ski, and then figure out if the result was correct. It’d take forever, and this is racing after all. Even recreational skiers at the beginning of their ski journeys are on the same performance spectrum as she is (just a lot closer to earth, metaphorically), and when we occupy our minds with the receipt of information from our senses it slows everything down for us, we become more aware and can adjust continuously and more quickly without, as I like to say, having to break out the manual or the calipers. Being present in this way may help Mikaela Shiffrin win more races, but for us it simply makes us more present, we learn more easily and thoroughly, and skiing becomes easier and better. More importantly, when we ski recreationally, that heightened awareness in the ‘stop-and-smell-the-roses’ sense of things, requires us to be present in a way that decouples us from our work-a-day lives, making it an incredibly joyful way to spend our time. That joy thing, it’s pesky but important.

For all skiers and riders, and certainly for me, long runs with great people in soft snow not only seem to happen slowly, but they linger in our memory forever. My mental album of the best runs of my life contains a lot of details: I can tell you where I was, who I was with, what the snow felt like, even as I fail to be able to describe the euphoria of it all. With Peter in the Cariboos up to our guts in old pine forests; with Stuart in Taos with snow falling so fast and so frothy it was hard to believe; with Tyler at Treble Cone transported to a powder heaven still tough to fathom; with Angela, Jeremy and Hampton on a Treble Cone morning so epic that it still makes me grin even though it ended with me destroying my knee. Very recently with Mikko and Veina here at Okemo along with a posse of grinning Finns loving every big, slow, dilated moment up to our knees in the Vermont woods in sub-zero temps. Those days all moved slowly and will last a lifetime. I cherish them.

So, my skiing and riding friends, let’s raise our glasses of gewürzt to Einstein the romantic, to Shiffrin the artist, to our next great powder day together, and to the students who will share in the joys of snow-induced time-dilation with us.

Lastly … GO GET ‘EM, SHIFFY! Sorry, I can’t help myself.