First time you tried to ski

For the inspiration behind this blog click here.

We’ve been planning our ski trip for next year. It’s become a bit of an annual thing for the past 3 years. We went to France for the last 2 years with a great group of people from Scotland and Ireland. Polmont ski club, if you’re out there – HELLO!

This time we are booking to go to Calgary in March 2007. We’ve chosen Canada because we have some good friends out who moved out there a few years back. It’ll be great to combine visiting them with testing the Canadian snow.

Do any of you skiers out there remember the first time you were put on, or put yourself on, a pair of skis?

I wasn’t as young as some of those wee tots you tend to see in foreign ski schools. Those kids are barely out of nappies and they are better skiers than most of us adults on the slopes. Last year I found myself on a chairlift in Flaine with a French girl of around 5 years old. That age estimate is guesswork as she was all wrapped up like a Michelin Man with so many layers of warm clothes. She only came up to my waist and all I could see of her face was a red and runny nose. Anyway, I had “volunteered” to take her up the chairlift as a favour to the ski school instructors.

Well I thought my French would be up to the standards of a five year old. I mean I can tell you my name and where I live, ask how to get to the Museum and point vaguely at something and say “What’s that then?”. But hey, I was wrong. I couldn’t really understand what she was saying, although I’m pretty sure I recognised a universal skiing language when she sighed and that frozen look of her nose. It’s code for “I’m knackered”, with a hint of “Why did my parents push me into this, I’m not really enjoying it?”. Of course, I could be barking up the wrong tree and she might really have been commenting on my flair for ski fashion and mogul jumping!

When I learned to ski I was in secondary school, around 14 years old. I learned to ski at Glenshee in the Scotland. I recall my poor attire – jogging bottoms and a pair of waterproof trousers. It was combined with a pair of borrowed skis that weren’t much more than two planks of wood with a hint of wax on the underside.

My parents were firm believers of us kids trying something for a while before they invested any hard earned money in the appropriate gear to encourage our pursuits. Looking back as a mature and well adjusted adult, I have to say I agree with their philosophy and its one lesson I’ll take on board if I have a family. However, I might tweak the theory when it comes to imparting this philosophy to my (sometime in the future) children. My memory of that approach was not so good – of course, also with a more mature head on my shoulder now, I do admit that I could be a bit of a brat as a child sometimes. So, the lesson learned there is that I will remember, if I ever have kids, that I was once a kid myself and not to never forget what that was like. Whatever they (my sometime in the future kids) go through, I will have probably gone through it at some point in the past.

So, back to the skiing. I’m on the slopes, well in the car park really, trying to stay on my skis. Oh boy it was hard and I came away frustrated, knackered, bruised and wet. But that’s what drove me to go back the next weekend. I was determined.

I think I doubted the logic and effort of it all when I came to my first attempt on the button (poma) tow. I couldn’t begin to recall how many button tows I missed when trying to pull the blasted thing down between my legs. It’s hard when you’re trying to manage two poles and have gloves on your hands that are probably two sizes too big (because you really do think that bigger gloves make your hands warmer!).

But I eventually made it to the top of the slope – a slope with a gradient so slight that yes I could have walked up it, but the point was to progress to the button tow stage. The sense of achievement! I was glowing with the effort and my sense of pride. Which of course was quickly lost in a “Bridget Jones” style moment of careering down said “slight gradient” (I didn’t say that going down the hill, the gradient was of course much steeper!). It’s amazing how fast two planks of wood can travel.

To top it all, the day I scaled the heady height of my first button tow, I ended the experience pretty quickly by crashing into another beginner, knocking them for six and being the probable cause of said beginner breaking her wrist. It wasn’t my fault that she happened to be standing next to a pile of upright skis and poles which didn’t really make for a soft landing!