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| 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.
