Ski Dunce

I'm sorry, this is another skiing post.

Apart from skiing with MK, I've been doing a lot of solo skiing. I guess you would say that I've turned into a a bit of a junkie. I'm 46 which is late to be learning and, as I see it, I only have a few years to really master this sport if I want to ski at a fairly high level through my fifties. Basically, I have to do most of my falling now, before the age at which it starts to cause injuries. So I have been going up the hill a few times a week and working hard on my technique. Nonetheless, I've been stuck. There are things I can't get beyond.

So I took a lesson. It was a group lesson, for advanced skiers. I've taken the very same lesson before, as well as some intermediate lessons on the same mountain. I knew, or thought I knew what to expect.

I should make it clear that, while I have good balance, do a lot of sport and I'm quite fit, I am not athletically inclined. I'm awful with aall ball sports, for example. My coordination is poor and have a lot of difficultly positioning my body in space. I university, for example, I had to drop out of my tap dancing course (I was a theater major) because I could not keep up even with the basic introductory drills. Still, when I put my mind to it, I can learn.

But not today. There were three of us in the group and we had two instructors. From the first exercise, I had trouble getting it. you had to two tow different things with your two different hands (things that one never does with one's hands when skiing) and a third thing with the legs. If I would have repeated it two or three times, I probably would have been OK, but we moved on right away. Next, they had us lay in the snow with our feet in the are and turn them. I didn't turn mine right. I'm still not sure what right would have been. Fresh on that failure to grasp the theory, we went on to apply it in practice. I didn't do very well at that either. I was still trying to apply the first exercise, which was about edging, and in this one we were not supposed to use our edges. Having failed to do things properly with or without edges, the second instructor, taking pity on me, started correcting my posture. With my new posture on my mind, my top/bottom separation (your shoulders are not supposed to move when your legs move) was lost. This was noted and offered as an explanation for my general uselessness. By this point, we were certainly in need of an explanation, as I had gone, in the space of an hour, from a confident skier, zooming down the black slopes with gusto, to a stiff, awkward novice who might have appeared, to an outside observer, to be trying out skis for the first time. At one point, I skied into a fence at about three miles per hour. Both instructors felt for me. They said they could see that I was afraid (I probably looked that way) and apologized for the steepness of terrain that was tediously flat. Over the next hour, they all but ignored the other two students and tried countless additional explanations and approaches and exercises meant to help me get it, but I got worse not better.

At the end, I thanked them for their patience, but I should have also thanked them for the opportunity to experience what MK so often has to live through. This was input overload, which had a cascading effect of shutting down my existent skills, requiring more and more mental effort just to stay functional. There was even a language component. The instructors were Russian and, as the lesson progressed, I stopped being able to understand their English. Classically, they were well intentioned, and as an expression of that, they placed more and more demands on my overloaded systems. They developed theories to account for what they saw and added to the complexity of the situation. All of this in front of my fellow students, giving a nice social edge to it.

I'm pleased to say that I did not ski off in the middle of the lesson (it was touch and go, but I really did want to learn). Once it was over, I went and got a coffee and made a list of the eleven things that they were asking me to do simultaneously. Then I went off and practiced two of them for the rest of the day (mixed in with a bit of regular skiing). I can report that I did in fact get some millage out of the two things I was working on. Nonetheless, it was a demoralizing experience. And I'm a grown man with all sorts of psychological supports and techniques at my disposal to help me shrug it off. I can only imagine how it must feel to someone younger and less able to see the experience from a distanced perspective.

I'm wondering if I should just go ahead and rename this blog: What Skiing Teaches me about Autism.

Following through through following

The other day MK and I went skiing. If you've read this blog before, you'll know that skiing has been a real boon for MK and that, though it was a challenge for him to learn how two years ago, once he got it, he really got it.

Nonetheless, by the end of last year we hit a plateau that MK was unwilling to go beyond. He had learned good parallel skiing style, including hockey-stops and all the rest, and he was comfortable with all those moves on the bunny slope or relatively flat parts of the green runs. But as soon as the pitch of the terrain steepened, MK would revert to the snowplow (a technique in which you point the tips of you skis together, making a triangle shape, which lets you move very slowly). That's a sensible thing to do when you fear you might loose control, but to be safe and have fun on steeper terrain, you really have to use parallel techniques. MK and I had quite a few talks about this, and I did a lot of coaching, and while he was willing to do a few parallel turns on the steeper stuff under duress, it seemed we had come to an impasse.

Since I am writing this post, you have probably guessed that something worked, and that we hit on a way of following through. If you paid attention to the title, you will also know that this was done through following.

What happened was simple. We were going done a really flat part of a green run and I was complimenting MK on his nice parallel turns. Then I said that I liked them enough that I was going to try to copy them. So I got behind him and skied exactly in his tracks, going where he went and turning where he turned. Amazingly, MK started making parallel turns all the way down, including the steeper parts, where he had always switched back to the snowplow before. When we got to the bottom, he told me he felt better about his skiing with me behind him. So we did it again, this time he decided to make it tough for me. He started skiing faster and speeding up the turns to try and throw me. On the third run he was actually carving (short fluid turns) and in a couple of places he did, indeed, make it impossible for me to stay in his tracks.

So there it is. He learned something and I learned something.