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.

Moving Through Transition (and other ski metaphors)

A little slice of autumn after arriving home from NZ recently.

It’s the first week in November and, amazingly, there are already a few resorts in the Eastern USA open for skiing and riding. We can, as we all say, “make some turns”. Not one turn, but lots of them. Arc ‘em and spark ‘em. Turn ‘till you burn. Tip and rip. For instructors, coaches and athletes, the theme, the moment, the phase of ski technique where we spend the bulk of our time is how we transition from one of those turns to the next; always the next one. It’s that transition between turns where we find out how good we really are. Not surprisingly, there are broader lessons to be learned from our focus on transition, on moving into the future, and they don’t necessarily have anything to do with skiing.

Okemo has changed a lot, evolving in order to become and then remain at the top of our industry. Still, no changes have effected the core of who we are as a resort in the same way as what we are undergoing right now. After several decades at the helm, putting Okemo on the map and making it the leader it is today, Diane and Tim Mueller recently concluded the sale of their resorts (Okemo here in Vermont, Sunapee in New Hampshire, and Crested Butte in Colorado) to Vail. Yes, that Vail.

When the official announcement about Vail’s acquisition came out last spring, the overwhelming response from the folks here in our little town of Ludlow – business owners, merchants, realtors, tradesmen, ski pros, and our many guests – was that this is a great thing for all of us. I agree completely and without hesitation, for a million reasons. Some good people have lost their jobs, and I do smirk a bit thinking about Vail’s corporate managers scratching their heads as they have to adjust their thinking in order to do business in our tiny little Vermont town. Still, there can be no question that this is terrific for our resort, for those of us who work here, and for those of us who play here.

Right now the open question for us, all of us, is how will the transition go? Yes, I know that I’m an instructor geek, but this transition is much like our skiing and we can ask the same questions. Did we get the details right as we finished the old phase so that we’re balanced and moving forward assertively into this new one from a position of strength? Have we set ourselves up so that we can we move where we want to go as a resort, as a team, without going somewhere else first? Are we feeling confident and is our awareness of what to do clear? In skiing, reticence, lack of confidence, fear of what comes next, or a lack of awareness of what it should feel like to move well through transition are some of the classic issues we focus on with our guests. Like our guests’ skiing, we’re going there anyway, it’s all happening, so let’s move in a way that allows us to be confident and find success.

In my own skiing, the piece of the puzzle that I’m working on improving (and have been for a while) is how my ankle and foot are set up within my inside boot as I finish one turn so that I enter each next turn with a strong platform on that same ski now as the new outside ski. It’s transition, plain and simple. Doing this well sets me up to be balanced along the length of my ski, moving unhurried and with selective control, ready for whatever comes next. Thankfully, I work with an exceptional boot fitter, I have an amazing coach to keep me honest, and I get a million reps to practice, so I’m making progress. As for Okemo, things get complex in a hurry and it may be tougher to keep fundamentals in focus while seemingly every detail of how we conduct business will be different.

Thankfully, these Vail people know what they are doing. They’ve been down this road a bunch of times before, I’m sure there’s nothing they haven’t seen in the acquisition process, and they sure as heck know how to run a successful resort. If our managers can focus on how to get from one turn to the next and keep their eyes on where we’re going, they too will be able to move forward with confidence and lead those of us on the staff into our new direction. It’s an exciting time to be here at Okemo, and it’s going to be an Epic season here in Ludlow … and there’s snow in the forecast!

The Song of the Gondolier

Ahh, the romance of a gondola! Gently cruising down the waterways of Venice, sliding past old world art-filled villas, sipping a glass of pinot gris in the sunshine while a gondolier quietly sings Puccini in the background. Simply wonderful … Unless, of course, you prefer skiing or snowboarding.

It makes me giggle a bit to compare the romance of the original gondolas to our still shiny, new Chondola at Cardrona Alpine Resort - I don’t necessarily think of Swiss or Austrian mechanical engineers as purveyors of romance. Still, as an instructor, I’d like to wax romantic about that wonderful piece of Austro-Swiss engineering made for us by our friends at the Doppelmayr / Garaventa group that we call MacDougal’s. I know it’s an odd thought, but work with me here: there are things about our beloved Chondola and what it allows us to do that make this instructor’s heart swoon, and it's one of the many reasons Cardrona is such a wonderful place to become a skier or a snowboarder.

Cardrona’s chondola replaced an old, fixed-grip, four-person chair lift that was pretty typical of its vintage. It served us well but didn’t really suit our ambitions as a resort. Most of the advantages of the new lift, now almost done with its second winter of use, are obvious: speed, capacity, reliability, comfort, convenience, bling (it’s pretty shiny!). The details that make this piece of engineering so stirring for me, however, are a little less obvious to the untrained eye, and there are a lot of them.

Take the upholstery of the chairs, for example. Yes, the upholstery. The six seats on each chair alternate red and black. Conveniently, those are our Cardrona colors, but it’s far more than that.  When we’re with new skiers loading a chairlift for the first time there are an awful lot of details to the process that can make them nervous, not the least of which are starting at the gate and then stopping on the red line precisely when and where is needed, and then aiming for the correct spot on the chair with five other people. Scary, uncomfortable, and a little too personal at times. Now, it’s a simple ‘eyeball your spot’, or ‘you’re in that red seat on the end’. It’s a small but substantial difference that has pretty far-reaching effects on everyone’s confidence and comfort-level. Color-coded seats rock.

Next example, just to make us all feel better, is the safety bar. Every other chairlift safety bar I’ve seen that has a foot rest attached to it rests against the front of the chair with a metal bar on the outside of each rider’s knees. These work well for adults, but wriggly little kids who are excited to be skiing and who have trouble sitting still on the chair can make us pretty nervous. Leaving no detail to chance, the fine engineers of our shiny new Chondola created a solution: the safety bars on MacDougal’s rest against the chair in between each rider’s knees and lock in place. That means that even the kid with worst shpilkes (a/k/a “ants in their pants”) can wriggle all he wants and still remain safely in their seat. Phew!

And then, last in my hit list but first in my heart, are the gondola cabins themselves. Oh gondola cabins, how I do love thee; let me count the ways! The speed of MacDougal’s and it’s ease of loading means that we can stay with our guests practicing on our wonderful beginner slope with its tunnel-covered lift for far longer, generating far more confidence than before and then still have plenty of time to make the move to the top of the mountain when they’re truly ready to ski or ride on Skyline. More importantly, we can make that first trip down the mountain without having had to go through that harrowing first chairlift ride up it, and that’s been a real game-changer for our guests who are new to the sport. Loooove the cabins!

There is, however, one more thing about the gondola cabins on MacDougal’s that most people don’t consider; something hiding in plain sight. Like all things romantic it’s about inspiration, plain and simple. When we’re working with first-time skiers and riders, they usually are not ready to ski or ride from the top of the mountain during their first two-hour lesson. Often, making sure that they’re happy to do so, I like to take these guests on a ride to the top in a gondola cabin, leaving our skis at the bottom. We get off at the top, walk the few steps up to the ridgeline to see the stunning view of the Southern Alps and Lake Wakatipu, take some photos, and then enjoy the leisurely trip back down in a cabin. The view from up there is genuinely inspirational and is frequently shockingly gorgeous. Still, that’s not the best part.

The best part of the sightseeing ride up is that when our guests are on our bespoke beginner hill they are surrounded by other beginners and their instructors and usually are so focused on what they’re doing that they don’t really get to see much else. Taking that ride up the gondola often is the first time they gain a real sense of perspective on where they are and, more importantly, what skiing and snowboarding can be like. Athletes in the park, in the pipe, and racing down All Nations are all in immediate view, as are so many experienced skiers and riders of all levels just having fun on all sorts of terrain. Our first time guests really get to see skiing and riding outside the beginner bubble. With a little simple explanation from their instructor, they can attach what they’ve been learning to what they see happening all over the resort. And that’s when the romance hits. “Wow, I would love to be able to do that! I would love to ski or ride there!”. Suddenly, their learning has a clearer purpose and direction, as though they can step out and see the horizon and put it all in perspective. That shining moment of inspiration is worth its weight in gold, for us as instructors and for our guests. For me, it renews my passion for snow sports every time, it reminds me why I love being a ski teacher, and I fall in love with our MacDougal’s Chondola all over again. A little pinot gris and Puccini would still be nice, but then that’s why Cardrona put a café up at the top station! Glass of bubbly with a view anyone?

Kafka Was Not a Ski Bum

A little blue sky as one of this week's storms clears at the top of Cardrona.

Now that we’ve completed the very busy few weeks of the Australian and New Zealand school holidays, I’m finally able to slow down enough to take stock of the past year, and it certainly was an interesting one. At home in the USA, I had four or five different jobs (depending on how you count) across several mountain ranges and in several different uniforms in the 2017-18 season. In my two short stints away from home and in Aspen, I had to learn my way around four different mountain resorts that were totally new to me and had to adapt to a very different working environment. It meant a lot of long days, long trips, suitcase-living, cold, wet, unfamiliar territory, all while focusing 100% on honing my craft as an instructor and coach while providing the best guest experiences I possibly can, to say nothing of working on my skiing. And now I’m in New Zealand where I have one uniform, one workplace, and one home … Phew, I made it.

My life here so far away, living in Wanaka, New Zealand and working at Cardrona Alpine Resort is terrific but I do wonder from time to time about having been brought here, having traveled all this way just to work. It’s another dimension to a question that my time in Aspen brought to mind and that stayed front-and-center for me this winter in Vermont. The question is a classic Kafka’esque dilemma, and it’s not a particularly rosy one – not at first.

The overly-simplified description of the Kafka dilemma I have in mind involves considering, for example, a ride at the zoo: is it intended to give the people a view of the animals or to give the animals a view of the people. Kafka wrote about this sort of scenario as genuine dilemmas in the sense that there is not a concrete answer, only the discussion from which we learn. Yes, although you are welcome to see this as just another piece of hyper-complicated gobble-de-gook from me, I do have a point to make about skiing, ski towns, and our relationships with our guests.

This Kafka concept first came to mind during a morning bus ride from where I was staying in Snowmass Village to work at Aspen Highlands – a commute of about 30 minutes. My daily bus route was along the one highway on the valley floor that enters Aspen from ‘down valley’. It should be no surprise that Aspen’s an incredibly expensive place, so down valley towns like Basalt and Carbondale are far more affordable places for the working folks that provide all of the labor for the busy resort and all of its supporting businesses, and everyone travels this same road. As the resort began to get busy and crowded for the December holidays, one particularly Aspen-y aspect of the commute was the airport, right along-side the highway, which began to stack up with triple parked private jets, more than I’d ever seen in one place and at one time. Sitting on the bus, ogling the countless jets on one side while on the other was the slow-moving traffic of old Hondas, hard-working pickups, and late model minivans filled with the resort workers was what brought Kafka to mind. Are we all commuting in to serve the jet people or have we brought them here to provide us with work and an income?

The dilemma unnerved me a bit, and I arrived at the Aspen Highlands locker room early in a contemplative state. My morning locker room routine often includes tuning my skis, something that always relaxes me and clears my head, and a positive minded conclusion started to take shape in my mind as I chatted with Aspen’s Director who also was in there tuning his skis - he’s a gifted staff trainer that I’ve known for a while and he’s always supremely level-headed. He asked how everything was going for me there and I told him the truth: that it was a wonderful experience for me but that I’d had my uncomfortable Kafka thought that morning. As expected, he helped me put a fine point on the positive and sincere conclusion.

The answer to the dilemma was that it wasn’t ‘us and them’, nobody was there to serve or be served. The right mindset, the one that makes the incredibly wide financial gap between the wealthy visitors and the hard-working day laborers, is one of welcoming all comers to a shared mountain experience. We make them feel welcome – the ski towns where I ply my craft are sought-after by the wealthy for the same reasons I’ve made them my home(s), and whether I’m on the hill with my guests in a lesson or out and about in town, making them feel welcome makes me appreciate where I am and what I do all the more. The experiences I have working and spending time with our guests is at least as valuable to me as the experiences I help provide for them,. The guest and the staff experiences in great ski towns like Ludlow, Vermont, Wanaka, New Zealand and Aspen Colorado run parallel 100% of the time and, thankfully, it feels egalitarian in truth and in spirit for all of us.

We’re all in this together in our mountain communities, we depend upon each other for our safety and for the quality of our experience. Kafka was wrong in this way: it’s not that one is there to look at or to serve the other; it’s that we’re drinking from the same spring, basking in the same sunshine, and sharing with each other all that our mountains offer us.

My Career is a Team Sport

Brush Creek in Snowmass, CO

Last week was a pretty typical one for me at this time of year. I spent the weekend days conducting training clinics for the Okemo instructors and helping a young race kid to find his gas pedal without his hair catching fire; and I did an evening shift helping out at The Boot Pro. Monday I was out of boots, getting stuff done. Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday I was at Mount Snow with the Professional Ski Instructors of America doing an understudy to get a close-up look at a new three-day combination certification exam and children’s accreditation. Friday, I was out of boots again, busy doing laundry, packing, getting my equipment dialed and generally dotting I’s and crossing t’s. And that’s where typical ended. Atypical began this past Saturday.

This past Saturday morning I drove to Bradley International Airport and began a long journey in the middle of the first big snowstorm of the season (yikes). The trip ended with a long van ride to the Roaring Fork Valley in Colorado on Sunday that was only slightly faster and more efficient than the original local stagecoach trip. 36 hours after my trip began, I arrived where I’m staying for the next month. In other words, it took 36 hours for me to land fully outside my comfort zone. Welcome to life as “the new guy”!

Change is good, but change is not always easy. I’m here in Aspen to gain some valuable exposure to how they do things here, to get some different perspective and broaden my horizons. Luckily, I do have some close friends here and the staff has been very welcoming. More importantly, I did not really make this trip alone. Along with me, riding side saddle to my experience here, are a number of people without whose support and encouragement, without whose tutelage and patience over the years I would not be in the position I am in the snow sports industry. I am indeed a very lucky man. They make it possible for me to do what I do, they keep me grounded, they’ve helped me carve out my own identity in the business and are an indelible part of who I am as a ski pro. Seriously, folks, they’re amazing. I can’t speak for everyone who does what I do, but for me, deep down in my DNA, my career is a team sport.

When watching an American football game, occasionally the cameras pan along the sidelines, shining the spotlight on the number and array of people it takes to do put teams on the field every week. For me, there is no spotlight and I have no teammates on the field with me, but I definitely have a team behind me 100% of the time. Mike Martini and my friends at Nordica USA provided me with new Dobermans that are simply the very best alpine boots available in the market. My friend Shon Racicot dialed in the fit of those boots in a way very few boot fitters on the planet are able to do, all from the bench in The Boot Pro in Ludlow. Rand Haskell may be the best ski tuner in America and does his miracle work downstairs at The Boot Pro to get my Nordica skis in immaculate shape. Not one member of my Okemo family flinched in encouraging me to come here. Tomorrow I’ll be on snow doing some training with the Ski Schools of Aspen and I’ll get an exceptional look at conditions through the latest POC lenses while protected by their state-of-the-art helmet. My colleagues in the Eastern Division of PSIA are all anxious to hear what I find here and are excited for me. My parents listen dutifully as I explain all of these relationships and how important they are. My Vermont housemates Jinx and Alex put up with all of my various neuroses in a way that boggles the mind. Coach Barb Marshall sits on my shoulder like Jiminy Cricket (only a but surlier) coaching me and keeping me honest in my dedication to our craft. And the echoing voices of so many coaches over the years inform all that I do and resonate day-in and day-out.

The point here is not simply to roll out the credits. The point is that I am not alone as I set about the very difficult task of actually making a living as a professional ski instructor. Not only do I have a team behind me 100% of the time, but the folks on that team are truly some of the best in the world at what they do. And I know that because I travel the ski world with their support. In New Zealand, all around the East, in the resorts around the country where I’ve been lucky enough to work from time to time, and here in Aspen and at Aspen Highlands where I’ll be based, I’m ready to go. I wouldn’t trade any member of the team that got me here and I’m grateful for each and every one of them.

Ooh, speaking of team support, can one of you send some of that snow Vermont's getting my way? Thanks a ton! In the meantime, I need to go and be ready for first chair or I’ll make coach Barb angry. And you wouldn’t want to see her angry.

Newton Was a Terrible Ski Instructor

Spring, last week, at Glendhu Bay in Wanaka, NZ

My seasons teaching skiing in New Zealand include an amazing amount of instructing mileage, most of it with beginner and intermediate skiers. Thankfully, it’s the best way I know to vet my ideas, shore up my understanding, and secure my belief in the fundamentals.

Each season, some theme seems to arise from the volume of work that I do which helps put skiing and teaching into perspective for me. That was certainly the case this past season, and that theme is still both cracking me up and informing my teaching. So, without further or due, Russ’s 2017 Big Picture Theme and Groundbreaking Thought About Skiing, drumroll please … wait for it …

Physics is only complicated when you explain it.

I’ve settled on the belief that once kids can run around, throw balls and catch them, annoy their sisters, and figure out that the stove is hot to the touch, their understanding of physics is perfect and all we can do as adults is mess that up. I’ll prove it to you with a few basic examples I’ve been using with guests – adults and kids. You’ll have to use your imagination (you were a kid once so you should have some imagination in there somewhere).

Example 1. First, a non-skiing example to keep it simple. Imagine a kid who’s learned to ride a bike with training wheels and who is heading out for their inaugural voyage without them. First, they adjust their balance going in a straight line. Then, once they're feeling good, they go around the corner. Now, imagine a kid going around the corner on a bike for the first time and tipping the bike the wrong way, to the outside of the corner instead of towards the inside. Huh? Exactly; it’ll never happen. They instinctively know how and in what direction to tip the bike. Now imagine what would happen if you tried to explain to them about tipping the bike going around the corner before they tried it for the first time. This is when you start to sound like the adults in a Peanuts cartoon (blah, blah, blah) and the only other sound you’ll hear if you’re paying attention is the sound of the fun getting sucked out of bike riding.

Example 2. Imagine that all five of us are in the back seat of my dad’s car on the way to soccer practice. Now, we all know that my father drives too fast, and today he takes a left turn way too fast. You, sitting on the far right side of the car seat as you are, get smooshed by the rest of us against the right side, don’t you?! Now, to stop you from getting smooshed will it work if we let our weight go to our right foot, stay strong on that leg and foot as the car goes around the corner? The answer is “duh”, of course it works. This is a good time to practice your quizzical kid, ‘adults are weird’ look – it’s very valuable.

Example 3. A common thing that ski instructors do when skiing with kids across very flat ground is the game of world-wide fame called “pole basket slingshot”. It’s simple: while sliding along your most despised cat track have a kid behind and slightly offset to one side of you grab hold of the basket of your ski pole that you’ve extended back towards her while you keep your hand on the grip, right pole if she’s on the right side, left if on the left (without poking her with it – safety first). Once she’s got a firm grasp, pull the pole quickly forward so she rockets forward. As long as kids understand the goal (e.g. going fast) they’ll know precisely when to let go of the pole so that they slingshot past you. Mix it up, change speeds, sides, facial expressions and you’ll all have a blast as long as you make appropriate sound effects. Explain the physics of the slingshot to them and they’ll suddenly miss their parents and will dread skiing with you forever.

I love talking to adults about skiing in this way, using these examples about our natural understanding of physics. I particularly love it when there’s a kid available to prove the point. Telling parents that their 6-year-old child has a perfect understanding of physics and then proving it never ceases to entertain me, although I usually have to redeem myself with one of my celebrated uncle jokes (“Hey, kid, snot funny. It’s, just, snot, funny.”).

Remember when Bill Clinton addressed the Democratic National Convention as keynote speaker when Dukakis was nominated? He droned on forever and then got resounding applause when he said “In conclusion”. We’re at that point here, which is to say that I’m getting to the point.

Isaac Newton was a great physicist and one of history’s greatest minds but he’d have made a lousy ski instructor. Newton wasn’t the first person to notice that apples fell from the tree to the ground. His contribution was in providing the correct explanation of why and how in a way that allows science to analyze, predict, and precisely calculate the effects of gravity. Without Newton, we’d never have flown in airplanes, launched satellites, or been to the moon. Still, without Newton apples would still fall, our kids would still tip their bikes the correct way going around corners, and skiing would still be awesome with awesome sauce on it.

My second theme from the season is apt here: clarity is more important than detail. Yes, that means clarity in explanation, but more importantly it means clarity in our students’ understanding. When we’re careful about digging further into the details and judicious about letting the curiosity of our students govern how deep we go, we’re more likely to keep things fun and make our teaching more effective for our guests. So, ski teachers, don’t mess with anyone’s clear understanding of something by explaining it. And this also goes for chefs, because I don’t want to know how much butter you’ve used when I’m eating birthday cake.

Our ski season here in Vermont begins in a few short weeks, and I’m looking forward to feeling gravity and lots of other principles of physics without having to explain them too much. Did someone say cake?