Green Light

As I mentioned back in an October column (see Lesson Learned, Finally, October 9, 2007), over many years I’ve been in the process of expanding my skill set in skiing to rely less on my natural, muscle-my-way-around-the-hill skiing style. In literal, physiological terms, it means relying less on the big muscle groups in my lower body, quadriceps in particular, and more on the many smaller muscles that wrap around the lower legs, ankles, hips and so forth.

Think of this evolution in terms of moving away from old-school down and up movements through the turn, a method which relied on the classic “bent zee knees” to bend the skis and use the recambering or rebounded energy of the skis to move one’s body in the opposite direction. This is why in old-school, straight ski days, for example, we bent our right leg and pressed our right foot against the ski to turn left. In modern skiing, to turn left we open our right ankle at the same time we close our left ankle, lengthen our right leg at the same time we shorten our left leg, and rotate both legs (femurs, really) to our left. All the smaller muscles used in these movements, particularly those in the lower legs around the ankles, allow us to have much more supple control, taking advantage of modern ski design and natural forces (inertia, centrifugal and centripetal force, etc.) to ski with greater efficiency and strength than ever before. Add a focus on greater core strength to keep the body in balance and stable, and ski technique really begins to look and, more importantly for the student, to feel a lot like the other sports we play. Ultimately, the big advantage of modern technique is that it is a far more natural set of movements, while “bent zee knees” involved movements and balancing methods unique to skiing. Obviously, the advent of shaped skis has a lot to do with this but they’re not the whole story. Chalk it up to ski people having a surplus of enthusiasm over brain power, and that we’re slow to progress (it’s so much fun as it is, change can be hard to keep on top of the priority list).

My intention here is not to provide a primer on modern ski technique. All of this information is by way of background for some recently-received good news. Late last week, I met with both my knee surgeon and my physical therapist and both were very pleased with my progress – I’ve been working out on my own here at Okemo since mid-December. I received the green light to add skiing to my rehab regimen by the end of February, and have some additional tasks to work my way back to having a strong and stable enough knee to and leg to make that possible. I’ll need to maintain a disciplined and deliberate approach, at first making only two runs on the lower mountain beginner runs twice a week. I’ll make slow, slippy, easy turns on short skis, two runs and then hang up the boots.

What’s the connection here? In some respects, my progress to date in rehab mirrors my progress as a skier and the evolution of skiing generally. So far, I’ve done a good, thorough job of playing to my strengths in my rehab, focusing on the big muscle groups and straight up and down, fore and aft movements. I now need to pay greater attention to a broader array of smaller muscles and stabilizing and directional movements in order to get myself fully ready to ski again.

It will be hard to not fall victim to Alan Greenspan style ‘irrational exuberance’, but if I am careful, keep my eyes on the big picture and do my job well, I should be able to use the whole process to continue my progress as a skier. I hope to come out on the other side of my knee surgery as a better, smarter and more effective skier and coach. Most importantly, if I really am able to start skiing again in three weeks, I’ll be much easier for my friends to handle. I can’t wait!

Out of the Chaos ...

For people who have never experienced a busy holiday period at a Northeastern ski resort, I happily provide the picture to the left. I took the photos from near the base area of Okemo on Sunday, December 30 at about 10:15 a.m. The crowd includes the lift lines for two separate quad chairlifts, the line for the base area magic carpet lift, people emerging from the base lodge for a late start on the day, and numerous ski and snowboard classes having just left line-up for the start of their lessons. On that day, Okemo sold somewhere in the vicinity of 11,000 lift tickets (not including a few thousand season pass holders). I'll report in later on the final numbers for what is turning out to be a record-breaking holiday season for us, but for now I'll just say that it's amazing that those of us in the Learning Center have been able to pull off what we've done given the resources available.

Over the last few years, as my book of clients has grown, I have rarely had to be in the base area for either our lower level ski group lesson line-ups or for the 3:30 p.m. "Kids Corral". They're impressive, if not a little nuts. Kids Corral is a little like being on the deck of a busy aircraft carrier in wartime, with the occasional jet 'coming in hot'. We literally set up a landing path with cones and waive in all of the ski and snowboard kids groups as they come down to the base, all the while trying to make sure that the children don't disappear until we've 'handed them off' officially to the appropriate parent. Our lower level ski group lesson line-up, while actually quite organized, looks absolutely chaotic to the untrained eye. OK, maybe it looks chaotic to everyone (see photos below), but at least those of us running the show understand what's going on and that all will be safe and sound. I've been running lower line-up with my friends and fellow supervisors Herb and Curt. We may keep it to ourselves, but we are a little amazed each day that we pulled it off. So far we've done so for our guests without a hitch (which I can't say for the other areas of the Learning Center).

My recent columns have not been particularly positive about my current role as a supervisor or about some of what I've seen from the staff, but this week I've been very proud to be a part of things around here. I've seen some amazing things from instructors. Several of our less experienced staff have been teaching an astonishing number of first-time skiers in lesson groups whose numbers often have exceeded our policy for the maximum. One sixteen year-old instructor, who had been a Junior Instructor with us for a few years, taught a level 3 adult group that was so big before we were able to split the group between her and another staff member that I gave her a commendation for teaching a group containing more adults than she is years old. In her case and in so many others, the staff's enthusiasm has been contagious, they've been good humored amidst some difficult circumstances, and most of them are continuing to give 100% while exhausted after having been teaching non-stop for over a week. It's wonderful to see, it has reaffirmed my faith and confidence in the people who teach here, and it leaves me wishing I were out there in the trenches with them.

Human Sacrifice

OK, 'human sacrifice' may be an exaggeration. How about 'ACL sacrifice' or 'season sacrifice'. By the morning on Monday, a big early season Nor'Easter had dropped over a foot of new snow on Okemo (note the weather map above). That was on top of what has already been an astonishingly snowy December by Vermont standards - the longest we've gone between storms has been four days. The skiing has been absolutely fabulous and we're all kicking ourselves, waiting for the other shoe to drop, though the forecast is calling for more snow right up through the holidays.

My friends here in the Okemo Learning Center have all come into the locker room or slid into line-up exclaiming about how good the skiing is, only to see me, feel guilty and then apologize for gloating. My response is that I'm better off, if not happier, knowing exactly how good it is, in detail, with precision. I want the complete and unvarnished truth so that I can keep my focus on getting strong and healthy. It'll also help me stay enthusiastic when speaking with the guests.

My friend Rich, our alpine manager and technical director (meaning he is responsible for the entire training and assessment program for the ski staff) walked into the locker room on Monday afternoon, clearly having skied all day in snow up to his thighs, and announced to all who could hear him (in typical Rich fashion) "Russ, you are the sacrifice." Apparently, I sacrificed my season so that all the rest of you could have all of this amazing snow, particularly on the heals of last year's disastrous start to winter. I'm not sure if I really would have voluntarily sacrificed my body, but I'll certainly take credit for it. Next year, perhaps, it'll be someone else's turn. I, for one, definitely will not feel any shame in taking advantage of it.

Kicking and Screaming

Following a cold November and a few big storms already, here in Vermont we’re off to the best start of any ski season in recent memory. All the snow has presented me with some interesting challenges, challenges out of the ordinary for me considering that I’m unable to ski. It may be an exaggeration to say that I’ve been dragged kicking and screaming, but I reluctantly have joined the ranks of management in the Okemo Learning Center after years of successfully resisting overtures to do so. Now that it’s a month into the season and I've gotten my sea legs as a supervisor, I thought I'd share some recently acquired insights into the broader snowsports business.

Back in November, I joined the Nordica sales staff at the annual Boston Ski and Snowboard Expo. This huge event takes place over four days each fall at the Bayside Expo Center in South Boston and is the largest consumer snowsports expo in the nation each year. All the major ski and boot manufacturers, resorts, travel companies, and gadget makers of all kinds set up booths displaying all of the current season's gear and Ski Market sets up an enormous sale center to liquidate their leftover inventory from the prior season. The event presents a fascinating and entertaining array of humanity. Half the attendees are busy looking for free stuff, half the attendees are looking for any and all equipment that will make them a better skier, and the third half are looking for a deal, any deal, however small. Many of the people attending are simply excited and ready to get out on the hill and are happy to talk shop with anyone who seems authoritative. Just about everyone who attends collects stickers like hypoglycemic children trick-or-treating on Halloween.

Apart from the difficulty of standing around for four days straight on cement floors and eating bad food a scant four weeks following knee reconstruction, the Boston Expo was certainly instructive, providing insight into the equipment sales and marketing side of the snowsports business. Mostly, the Boston Expo confirmed that I'm very glad to be on the skiing side of the ski business. I'll resist the urge to lay out the large number of incredibly funny anecdotes from the event except to say that I was not aware that it's a great thing to have a ski in the Nordica lineup that is "wicked awesome fast, just like a Solomon Pocket Rocket", said with the thickest South Boston accent one can imagine (think "Sawlimin Pawkit Rawkit"). I’m grateful for my relationship with Nordica, for the people, the equipment, and the insight derived from all of the above. How they do what they do on the sales side is beyond me, but it certainly helps that they (really, we) believe in our product, are passionate about our sport, and genuinely enjoy working with people, whatever their accent or level of expertise.

Speaking of expanding my understanding of the industry beyond my limited place in it, becoming a supervisor is proving to be a little different from what I imagined it to be. Just as I find while instructing, the guests are fun, genuinely excited to ski and to improve as skiers and, while occasionally needy, a pleasure. Their enthusiasm is contagious. The problem for me is the staff and my new relationship with them.

In recent winters, the running joke among my friends is that I’m the shop steward. I run among the supervisory staff, count them among my best friends, seek their counsel and am sought for counsel, and represent a line instructor’s perspective in the decision-making process. In a normal winter, while skiing around the hill with guests, I occasionally see things occurring in other lessons or being done by other instructors with which I do not agree or which do not meet my own standards of professionalism or quality skiing and teaching. In a normal winter I see them, make a mental note, and continue along my way, unimpeded and unaffected. This is no normal winter.

Perhaps because I am unable to ski and teach, and certainly because I’m the person assigning staff to their lessons, I feel responsible for the content and conduct of everyone’s lessons. It’s a problem for which there is no solution. Yes, I can try the Taoist approach and affect the staff in little ways with subtle comments, but that’s not particularly effective in the short term and not particularly gratifying. It’s not that the guests aren’t having a good experience or that they’re not learning anything. It’s just that the quality is not what I know it can be.

This is not intended to be a commentary on our Learning Center or on ski instructors generally. The majority of our staff does an exemplary job. I’m lucky to have numerous colleagues whom I trust to provide my own guests (a term I prefer to ‘client’ or ‘student’) with the same level of care and quality experience that I would provide myself if I were able to teach this year. The difficulty for me lies with the few staff members that I know can be better but aren’t. I am open to the possibility, a significant caveat to this whole analysis, that I am particularly sensitive this season to issues relating to other peoples’ skiing and teaching.

Ultimately, apart from my own personal psychosis relating to other instructors’ performances on the job, there are two aspects of what I’m doing this year at Okemo which form the crux of what makes it different. First, rather than providing guest service on an intensive, extended and mostly one-on-one basis, I am now providing guest service to many, many people every day for very brief periods of time. Secondly, as in the case of the Boston Expo, I’m seeing a side of the business about which I have been blissfully and intentionally unaware.

At the end of the day, each day, I am an instructor and coach. I’m very grateful for my current job and for my wonderful relationship with Nordica and the people at our local retailer, Northern Ski Works, and I intend to learn a lot from all of the above. Ultimately, however, I hope this added breadth of experience will help me improve my own teaching, my own skiing, and my appreciation for and understanding of the people with whom I am fortunate enough to ski.

Almost There

The weather has been ideal for snowmaking, the "Guns and Hoses" crews are at full strength and in top form, and judging from the energy in town everyone - guests and staff alike - is excited and ready for the season to start at Okemo.

It may sound self-serving, but even those of us who have worked at Okemo for a while continue to be amazed by how good our snowmakers are. I took these photos on Saturday afternoon and from town the next morning there was visible progress, far beyond what you see here. The long range forecast looks to be in our favor so we could have our best start in recent memory.

Given the way the season began a year ago, one could be excused for concern that the excitement in town is merely 'irrational exuberance', to borrow from Mr. Greenspan. Thankfully, conditions on the ground seem to belie good reason for excitement. I'm not sure how I'll react once the season kicks off and I can't join in the fun, but for now I'm as fired up as anyone. Three months of off-season is enough.

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.