Geezers

One of the more curious aspects of my experience last summer in New Zealand was the incredible lack of old people in Wanaka. There simply weren’t any. On the snow school staff at Treble Cone, there were precisely two people older than me, and they included my friend Dave who is a whopping eighteen months older than me. Many of the young staff there took an approach to skiing (and to me, at first) that seemed based on the presumption that they had invented skiing the week before and knew it all. After a few runs with me, the lay of the land became clearer to my young colleagues and all was well, but I couldn’t help but think back to all the older people with whom I have the privilege of working at Okemo. Having them around is a real blessing and, from a technical ski teaching point of view, really helps me maintain a healthy perspective on my own goals and on the goals of our guests.

At Okemo, we have many instructors who are well into their ‘70’s, who are terrific instructors, a lot of fun to work with, and who continue to ski and ride at a very high level. Most of them are retirees or second career ski pros, but a few of them have been dedicated to the craft of ski teaching for a very long time. Some can legitimately be considered as major contributors to the development of the sports of skiing and snowboarding in America and the world. As a group they’re very unassuming, and more often than not, the guests have no idea of the vast amount of ski teaching experience staring out at them from under graying eyebrows. It seems to me that my friends prefer to keep it that way, though I often tell the guests the full story when this particular group of instructors is out of ear shot. Learning that their instructor is 77 years-old, has been a full-cert for more than fifty years and was on the training staff at Stowe in the 1950’s has quite an impact on someone skiing for the first time.

The stories our older instructors share about skiing and ski teaching really are amazing, and frequently their skiing will stop our younger staff in their tracks. Imagine a 70-plus year old instructor, with one eye and an artificial hip, having survived a quadruple bypass and demonstrating to the young park and pipe rippers the ballet moves he used to teach in the 1960’s. You try doing a worm turn or a tip roll with a glass eye, a titanium hip and a grin as wide as your goggles!

There are many little funny and heart-warming anecdotes I could relay here, but I’ll resist the urge to do so. Suffice it to say that I hope anyone who considers themselves devoted to skiing has the opportunity to ski with someone like these friends of mine. They have so much to offer, so little concern for the latest and greatest (they’ve seen it all before), and yet, as teachers, continue to learn, evolve and guide their own experiences on skis so as to create a better experience for all of those with whom they share their sport. The ripples emanating from the work of my more senior colleagues at Okemo touch the lives of many, and have a long lasting, happy and healthy impact on the lives of a lot of people, guests and staff alike. Thank God for the geezers.

Gemütlichkeit

The literal translation of the German word “gemütlich” is “warm and congenial, pleasant or friendly”. The literal translation of “gemütlichkeit” is “warm friendliness, amicability” (both according to the American Heritage Dictionary). These translations don’t quite convey the real meaning of the words, however. In substance, they connote a certain kind of social acceptance or ease, an atmosphere of cheerfulness, of communal or shared, easy activity at a relaxed pace. A great old ski lodge and a warm pub filled with friends and neighbors both may be described as gemütlich places, or as being filled with gemütlichkeit.

I had a particularly fun morning skiing with a couple of friends today. It reminded me that the actual act of skiing itself is only one small part of what I enjoy about skiing generally.

After several runs – which continue to get better and stronger, incidentally - on my third day back, my friends and I took a break inside the summit lodge at Okemo. The lodge was busy for a weekday morning, but it was a particularly merry crowd of mostly locals taking refuge from the wind and cold.

Making my way from the cafeteria, hot chocolate in hand, to the seats we had scoped out took some time. This wasn’t because it was crowded, but because there were so many people I knew in there, all surprised and happy to see me up on top of the mountain. I can’t articulate just how good it made me feel to be greeted in that way, to be encouraged by so many people, some of whom are friends but many of whom are merely acquaintances but generally glad to see me in ski boots. We sat, my friends and I, chatted with those around us, swapped stories, and generally did what normal people enjoying a day of skiing do when taking a break. In a winter season that has been anything but normal, it finally felt to me like I was back, among my people, where I feel that I belong. Gemütlichkeit, even in our brightly lit, not particularly cozy summit lodge here at Okemo. It’s the people that make a community and an atmosphere, and it was a joy to be welcomed and to share in it this morning.

Siren Call

Your chariot awaits.

Numerology

What's the significance of the numbers 164 and 133? Let's just say that the first photo here was taken of me 164 days ago and the second 133 days ago. The third and fourth? Oh yeah, they were taken this morning. Yep, you're heard correctly.

This morning, five and a half months after destroying my ACL and four and a half months after reconstructive surgery, I skied. I made three runs on the lower mountain here at Okemo, making light, easy short turns on a beginner trail. I felt quite good and, after some initial jitters, really enjoyed it. At a minimum, it was great to get up on the hill, feel the wind on my face, and move faster than I can walk.

The most important aspect of this morning is that it's a big benchmark but a small step. After Presidents' Week (which starts tomorrow and is the busiest week of the year for us), I'll add a little skiing to my rehab regimen and slowly, very slowly, build up distance, time and speed.

In the meantime, I get to exhale and take satisfaction from all of my hard work paying off. There is light at the end of the tunnel, and it's casting a glow on my ski boot clad feet.

Fifteen Minutes

I had a funny conversation with a friend of mine yesterday evening on the telephone. He commented to me that he had enjoyed the article he'd read about me, to which I responded "What article?" Apparently he had read an article about Okemo and about me in a ski magazine. The question I posed to him is whether fame counts towards my fifteen minutes if I have no idea it's happening. The fact is I recall very well having given a lesson to Karen Lorentz, a long-time Vermont-based ski writer who has done a fair bit of work for Okemo in the past. As far as I was aware, nothing came of our morning together, where she and I spent time on getting her skiing ready for a trip out West by giving her a discrete focus.

Let's be clear, I'm not about to equate getting some good press in Snow East magazine to being covered by an article in Time or appearing in a photo with Paris Hilton in People, but it is a nice piece of PR. The article is about Okemo generally, providing some background on the history of the resort and its development. The magazine is a free, early-season publication distributed in base lodges, ski shops and the like. It's actually a reasonably well-written and thoughtful piece, but it's also as close as I'll ever get to being photographed with Paris, and that's just fine by me.

Here's a link:

http://www.snoweastmagazine.com/articles/Great%20Eastern%20Resorts/Vermont/Okemo%202008.pdf

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.