You're NOT perfect!

-No More Lessons-

There is a common sentiment amongst young skiers who are no longer beginners that they are too cool or too good for lessons.  One summer in Vermont when one of my uncles was taking me 4-wheeling around the mountain he often skied at during the winter, he was pointing out all these "sick trails" as we crossed them.  Earlier in the day when I was with some of our older relatives, one of them was telling me about how another takes a lesson every time she goes to a ski area for the first time in a given season.  If she visits 5 different ski areas in a season, she will have taken at least 5 lessons.  It was unsolicited advice but I was not yet a very accomplished skier.  Just like everything else in my life that I have since become good at, I was a late bloomer.  So I had no answer to this advice even though I had given up lessons long ago.

Well, my uncle was talking about the perks of having a family camp right near a major ski area.  Lift tickets were cheaper if you bought multi-day tickets and season passes were even cheaper still if you skied there like all the time.  The best part was, there was no lodging cost and very minimal restaurant-associated spending.  I asked about lessons without mentioning whose idea it was.  He said "Lessons?!  If some cow tells me that I have to take lessons, I'd just laugh and spit in his face!"

I was relieved, and rather amused.  So I was not the only good skier, or in my case an aspiring good skier, who shunned lessons long ago.  During one of the last lessons I had taken, back in the days at the little local ski hill, the instructor said "I know that you all can ski, but I'm going to teach you how to ski RIGHT!" and did a [Boston Bruins national anthem singer] Rene Rancourt-style fist pump while saying "right."  Cheesy?  Absolutely!  All the techniques I was being taught just seemed like ways to cause me to ski even more slowly than I did before when compared to the cool big kids at the ski hill who tended to ski fast.  So I eventually ditched taking lessons altogether.

-The Next Level-

Over the years I moved on from the little local ski hill to real ski mountains.  Eventually I made my way to advanced and occasionally even expert terrain.  The latter depended upon each individual trail and upon snow conditions.  Basically, if the conditions made the less difficult expert trail less difficult than it usually was, I'd take it on so that I would have the satisfaction of having skied a double-black-diamond (expert) trail.  But, for the most part, I still had to pick and choose which trails I would take based upon their ability level rather than just indiscriminately going down them.

After making the courageous leap to advanced and expert terrain (after a too-long spell of intermediate skiing) and finally looking like I actually belonged there while skiing it, I got to a point where I found some other limitations in my ability.  I could only seem to ski really well if we had a hardpack, packed powder, or (gasp!) groomed corduroy.  I struggled with ice and had no idea how I would handle deep powder.  I had hit a plateau.

Since I had never skied out west at this point, I believed all the exaggerated stories people tended to tell about the deep snow and the extreme terrain.  Because I was planning to go out west in the near future, I decided that I may wish to work on my technique or at least figure out what is preventing me from improving when there was clearly a lot of room for improvement.  So I took a lesson nearly every ski day of the season that preceded my move out west.

Very basically, my problem was balance.  I was either too dependent upon my own forward momentum when leaning too far up the hill between turns or I was too dependent upon favorable ski conditions that enabled me to do those dreadful heel-driven windshield-wiper turns.  Overhauling my technique required a bit of hard work and self-discipline.  But by the end of the season I took a lesson specifically for mogul (bump) skiing.  I had come a long way.

-Fine Tuning-

I drove out to Telluride, Colorado soon after with a carload of belongings.  When the next ski season came I joined the ski school and became a ski instructor.  This meant that I got to enroll in all kinds of clinics for instructors where we got to fine-tune our ski technique.  A lot of these tricks we learned were of an advanced nature but there were also some things we worked on that seemed very elementary.  After all, even really good skiers have managed to pick up some bad habits over the years.  Besides, the elementary skills are often the foundation upon which some of the more advanced skills are built.

Another of the perks of being an instructor was that you could also enroll in a free group lesson during a day off.  Well, I did just that. Although group lessons are theoretically available in all levels from single-green (early beginner) to double-black (expert), it turns out that the highest level that actually has enough enrollment to justify a group lesson is usually double-blue (advanced intermediate) on a good day and single-blue (early intermediate) on most other days.  I was rather disappointed that there were no black or double-black groups going.  No instructor is going to offer a private lesson for free; if they're not getting paid, they'd rather freeski.

So I joined the double-blue group, knowing it would be well below my ability level, but I wanted to check it out anyway just to see what one of these lessons would be like from the other side now that I had become accustomed to being the instructor rather than the student.  My colleague leading the single-blue group offered to let me join his group if I wanted to work on some of the "slower" stuff.  I declined but his offer was nonetheless valid.  He knew how good a skier I was and I did learn some things I had not thought of before during the double-blue lesson.  The same would likely have been true with his single-blue lesson, albeit with more basic techniques.  Every instructor brings a slightly different perspective and style to the lesson so there's always something to learn.  Nobody's too good for a lesson, even a low-level lesson.

-The End-

I understand that lessons cost money.  But if you're okay with that, it's worth it.  And if you're getting it for free, then why not?  Lessons are certainly a more effective way to learn skiing technique than watching films by [winter sport filmmaker] Warren Miller.  Seeing the way sponsored professionals ski from multiple camera angles and distances is one thing but feeling it yourself is a whole different matter.  There's always room for improvement.

John 8: 31-42