Directions to Carnegie Hall

A classic New England coastal salt marsh in summer, pronounced "sault mash".

Yesterday, I had several different and very specific alpine ski technique details in mind throughout the day. This does violate a deeply held conviction of mine that less information and a narrower focus is vastly more effective learning, better training than more and broader, but I somehow muddled through it. The various aspects of skiing that I was working through yesterday were overwhelmingly centered on the functional relationships of various body parts and that functionality’s effect on efficiency, strength and performance. Developing and maintaining that sort of functional awareness, particularly when it relates to specific muscle groups, requires a lot of repetition and few distractions. Frankly, I do enjoy that sort of training, as it’s rare for me to have the opportunity for several prolonged, uninterrupted hours of focus.

Just to be clear, yesterday I was doing landscaping. Not skiing.

One of the training opportunities I’ve always enjoyed about my “summer winter” teaching and coaching skiing in Wanaka, New Zealand is that I do not personally receive much coaching. Yes, I realize that sounds odd but I promise it’s not a non-sequitur. The lack of training received combined with the large volume of teaching hours with a great variety of people who are intermediate and beginner-level skiers provides an enormous volume of repetition of slower-moving ski turns in which fundamental concepts remain front-and-center of my mind and my awareness. I admit it, I am a terrible multi-tasker, but I can be aware of my core muscles winding up and unwinding from turn to turn, for example, while maintaining a singular focus on whatever piece of the skiing puzzle is at the center of my guests’ and my time together. My antipodean “summer winters” have been, in that odd sort of way, like my own ski teaching version of staying after basketball practice to shoot free throws. Thousands of them.

Quite obviously, in the Age of COVID, I am not in New Zealand. I am not on snow, I’ve had to somehow cobble together a living this “summer summer” in a strange new place, far from my wonderful Wanaka friends, and with an unsettling amount of uncertainty about the future. But I do wonder: will the actual absence of skiing and, frankly, the absence of ski-focused conversation actually benefit my skiing awareness in some way? The truth is, I know it will, even if it’s not as much fun as actually teaching skiing.

A major component of our instructor certification exams involves being assessed on “teaching for transfer”, which is instructor-speak for finding common ground between a guest’s non-skiing experiences and whatever specific detail of their skiing we’d like to improve or have as a focus for our time together with them. For one teaching component of their instructor exams, candidates are given scenarios describing a particular hypothetical guest, a description of their skiing, and an explanation of that guest’s goal for their lesson. It’s an exercise designed to demonstrate that we can transfer our skiing and ski teaching knowledge in a way that is understandable and relatable to a wide array of people without having to throw the book at them or completely deconstruct their skiing in order for them to evolve as skiers. Invariably, this component of the exams becomes teaching by analogy –kicking a soccer ball, boxing out in basketball, lifting heavy objects and placing them on a high shelf, feeding goldfish … As long as the non-ski activity is something that the guest understands in a meaningful way, relating to it can assist in their understanding and awareness of the movements of skiing. I do make the joke from time to time that this way of examining can lead to the mistake inexperienced instructors make that I call ‘death by a thousand analogies’, but done well it’s obviously effective. What’s interesting to me about my current off-snow predicament, is that I’m experiencing the exact opposite in real time: finding the sensations of skiing in anything, everything else I do as a way of practicing. It’s like practicing free-throws by chucking crumpled pieces of paper from my desk across the room to the trash can and hoping it works come game-time.

Kidding aside, pretty much any awareness of bodily movements and functional relationships counts from a neuromuscular practice point of view. As a practical matter, with a “summer summer” in place of my normal “summer winter” it’s simply the approach I have to take, but it does put me on the same footing as pretty much everyone else so at least I’m in good company.

Cry me a river; I’m not skiing in New Zealand this summer. Unlike New Zealand, at least while here in America people understand it when I ask them the classic question: How do you get to Carnegie Hall? Practice, practice, practice is the answer; and that's apparently true whether we’re on snow or off of it.

I need to go carry some heavy bags of topsoil from one side of a property to the other. After all, every rep counts.