Deb, a friend of mine says – “You can either sit back home and watch the snow or get out and enjoy in it.” During last winter, I was not very aware about the things to do during winters in US. My travelling and outgoing experiences started getting better only by the start of summers.
Sachin, one of my best buddies from college had recently moved from Wisconsin to Rhode Island. We’re now just two and a half hours away. The last time we met was almost a year ago on the weekend next to when I had just reached US. At that time, he drove down alone from Wisconsin to New Jersey to meet me. That’s the way he is, switching the borders of genius and insanity. :-)
After he got down in Rhode Island, we were obviously to meet on the next weekend available to both of us, which came out to be the long weekend of Christmas (Dec 22-25). I was coming back from Baltimore and was about to cross New York City when I got Sachin’s phone call about confirmation for the coming weekend. Not only me, he was also driving and was actually coming back after skiing. Although we had agreed upon it when we planned to meet the first time that we’ll go skiing when we meet, I refused as I was running low on finances and it was going to cost $150-200. To give up is not Sachin and since I knew it, I agreed to go after 2-3 refusals. Finally, on the Friday of 21, he called me to reconfirm the program, which I thought he had forgot, as both of us didn’t talk the whole week. My car was with the mechanic for an expensive repair, so I asked him to come down and he was fine with that. Only after he got there, I wished he would not have drove down with his 1994 Nissan Sentra that already had 200,000 miles on it. He drove it down 1000 miles from Wisconsin to Rhode Island. Anyways, he made it and we finally met after a year and 2 weeks. With the car repair, I now wanted even less to go skiing. Money does matter. :-)
I thought that events like skiing need a lot of planning and reservations, but it turned out to be just like going for a picnic, at least until you really start doing it. He was here only until Sunday evening and we decided on Friday night to go skiing on Saturday evening. First awkward thing he mentioned was to go ski in night and I tried not to give him a shocked expression. Cheaper tickets and getting away from sun’s reflection on ice in daytime were reasons good enough to explain his point. Fati also had an appointment related to her job in the morning, which also supported the idea of night skiing. We kept talking until 3-4 AM the Friday night. Sachin got up relatively early the next morning and did some research on ski areas in Connecticut. We did some cost distance analysis and finalized the Mt Southington ski area in Southington, which was less than an hour away and was costing us $58 per head including the first time free sessions for Fati and I.
For skiing, you basically pay for two things, the lift pass and the ski rentals. Lift pass is to use the lift to go up to the top of hill from where you come down skiing. Secondly, people like us pay the rent for skiing equipments. Skiing equipment consist of a pair of shoes that are heavy enough to make elephants uncomfortable and strong enough to fix a fractured leg; a pair of skis that are flat, thin and long plastic platforms to fit those shoes for people from Jupiter and are used to for speed and balance and a pair of pole sticks which are never used, especially initially.
In our package, we had free lessons for an hour and a half. Before we could find instructor, Sachin taught us basics, who is already an expert from my perspective. Wearing the skis was the easiest part and everything after that was a challenge. During little practice after lessons from Sachin, I was continuously loosing balance and falling down, which was both enjoyable and physically hurting. I once started slipping down a small slope with direction of my skis such that my legs got wide stretched and I fell down with my skis still on. It took me a while to find a way to get rid of the skis and straighten my legs. This was probably my longest and most strenuous stretching in my whole life and that was just the start.
After some confusion about the place where we were supposed to meet, we finally met the instructor 30 minutes later than the scheduled time. She took us up to a little slope where our formal lessons started. First few minutes were to explain the structure of ski (mostly flat with sharp edges) and it’s use. Fati was not even able to get herself on the skis because of the snow stuck to the bottom of her shoe and it took a lot of overall energy of our instructor Sandy to clean that off multiple times in that one hour.
Stopping and turning are the most important things that you should at least theoretically know before starting the practical. Forming a pizza slice shape using your skis with the tip of slice in front of you and forming a sitting posture by putting pressure on your thighs and hips were the easy ways we were told to remember how to stop and turn. The instructions were simple to learn and understand, but falling down was still our favorite method to stop as soon as the speed or imbalance scared us. The very important thing that we later realized out of this was to give away the fear of speed and stay balanced at whatever speed. You just have to keep saying to yourself that the speed can be controlled well using technique.
With skis on, it was hard to stand still. Ski was kind of my master and I slave. Ski would start moving me all of a sudden without my consent. The only way to stop being a slave was either to enjoy being it and keep doing what ski want you to or resist and hurt yourself by rolling in the snow. For a long time, I was just resisting, which didn’t work well and I learnt it the hard way. It took instructor a good effort and time (~30 minutes) to get us to stop without falling. Even after knowing the technique, using gravity and making close contact with snow was my favorite.
By the time we were finally able to successfully stop ourselves at lower speeds, we were only left with 5 minutes to learn the turning part. It’s anyways logically important to maintain balance and control speed, but another importance for me to learn it was to avoid collisions with others. The learning part was only for me, not for others and they would definitely not appreciate the idea of being hit by some 80 kilo rolling piece of mass. Turning was only slightly different from stopping. Instead of applying pressure on both skis, you just do it on the one depending on direction you want to turn. To turn right, you put pressure on left one and vice-versa. In crux, stopping and turning is all about putting pressure in right amount and posture.
During our sessions, Sachin was checking on us every 15 minutes. He was waiting to take us to the hilltop for the real fun of the day. The time finally came at 8:30 PM after an hour of instructor-led and half an hour of Sachin-led training. After an hour and a half, I was little confident about stopping but not turning.
Now was the time to start using the lift pass. That’s also a unique experience in itself. The lifts keep circling continuously up and down the small hill. The lift is like a trolley that can sit two people and what we generally refer in India as “Udan Khatola”. To get on a lift, you’ve to synchronize yourself with the lift movement. As soon as a lift leaves the boarding station, you start moving forward to catch the next one and this has to be done with your skis on. Next step is to bend yourself so that you can get on the next lift, which doesn’t actually stop. You just have to catch a running lift, as we do in India with trains and buses. It looks and sounds crazy but it works very well and the speeds are pretty slow to hurt anyone. Also, the lift stops in case of any problem there is always an attendant to help. This part was well explained and demonstrated by Sachin already, so I did fine. What came as a surprise, rather shock was to get down at the top of hill. I assumed that there would be somebody on the other end too, which of course was a bad assumption. You have to get down on your own with your skis on and that too on a slope. I once thought of going back down in the same lift, which I realized after getting down, was not an option. I finally thought of the worst case scenario and said to myself that if the ski try to master again, just resist and fall down. That might hurt a little bit, but was a good option at that time. All this happened in less than 10 seconds. To my surprise, I got down fine and was also able to stop myself within 20 feet. After I stood still, I saw the stop stick at the turning point of the lift from where it started going back down. If you couldn’t get down, your legs will definitely hit that stick and that stops the trolley for some time good enough for a person to get down.
Looking at our small hill from bottom to top didn’t look as scary as it seemed from top. Although I was a little confident on my braking skills now, I had not tried it on steep parts where speed would be much higher. Two things that kept my spirits high were:
This is simple and there is no way I’m going home without going from top to bottom successfully, without falling.
If so many people here could do it, there is no way I can’t
I started from almost very top of the hill, where I fell down a couple times without even getting a start. Finally, when I started my first descent, the speed got so high that I got scared and lost balance and demonstrated some out of control aerobatic stunts. That happened at least 2-3 times on the steep parts of that simplest hill in the ski-area. I finally decided to walk down halfway and then start from there, where also I kept failing and falling. I somehow finally reached the bottom after falling N number of times and walking down the hill at steep areas. That was definitely not a motivating start.
With all twists and turns that my body went through, it was definitely not at its best now, but whenever the thought of being physically unfit came to my mind, the devil inside me would say – “Yeah, that’s a nice excuse of not doing it, you loser”. Sachin did the same job too. But as I said earlier, there were two things that kept me going. Once I reached bottom of the hill, I now decided to go up walking halfway and ski from there. This also didn’t work well for sometime, but the rate of failure was getting lower as I was not doing the steep parts. After doing that a couple times successfully, I decided to start over from top again. I was getting better but not where I wanted to be. In next two attempts, I earned more pain for at the cost of controlling myself better. The cycle repeated thrice.
It was not until my fourth attempt that I was finally able to make it from top to bottom in one go. The speed was high enough to have all my hairs aligned with the wind. That very moment when I stopped at the base was triumphant and gave me a sense of achievement. It reminded me the day when I was first able to ride a bike by myself. “Yes, I did it” were my first words and those were very much visible in my physical action too. I realized in a moment that the body movement with the feeling was not a good idea. At least my skis didn’t like it and I stumbled, but somehow managed to stand still. That was at 9:35 PM and our pass was to expire at 10:00 PM. In those 25 minutes, I did it again four times and in my final attempt, I was able to control my direction as well. I stopped very near to where I wanted to. Not only was it fun, it was a new thing that I learnt, it was thrilling, adventurous and needless to say triumphant. As I’m writing the experience two days later, I still feel it in most parts of my body. :-)
The part I missed was to take pictures for which I’ll go back to some ski area some time soon. I’ll hopefully do few steeper hills this time with better control on myself.
Sachin, one of my best buddies from college had recently moved from Wisconsin to Rhode Island. We’re now just two and a half hours away. The last time we met was almost a year ago on the weekend next to when I had just reached US. At that time, he drove down alone from Wisconsin to New Jersey to meet me. That’s the way he is, switching the borders of genius and insanity. :-)
After he got down in Rhode Island, we were obviously to meet on the next weekend available to both of us, which came out to be the long weekend of Christmas (Dec 22-25). I was coming back from Baltimore and was about to cross New York City when I got Sachin’s phone call about confirmation for the coming weekend. Not only me, he was also driving and was actually coming back after skiing. Although we had agreed upon it when we planned to meet the first time that we’ll go skiing when we meet, I refused as I was running low on finances and it was going to cost $150-200. To give up is not Sachin and since I knew it, I agreed to go after 2-3 refusals. Finally, on the Friday of 21, he called me to reconfirm the program, which I thought he had forgot, as both of us didn’t talk the whole week. My car was with the mechanic for an expensive repair, so I asked him to come down and he was fine with that. Only after he got there, I wished he would not have drove down with his 1994 Nissan Sentra that already had 200,000 miles on it. He drove it down 1000 miles from Wisconsin to Rhode Island. Anyways, he made it and we finally met after a year and 2 weeks. With the car repair, I now wanted even less to go skiing. Money does matter. :-)
I thought that events like skiing need a lot of planning and reservations, but it turned out to be just like going for a picnic, at least until you really start doing it. He was here only until Sunday evening and we decided on Friday night to go skiing on Saturday evening. First awkward thing he mentioned was to go ski in night and I tried not to give him a shocked expression. Cheaper tickets and getting away from sun’s reflection on ice in daytime were reasons good enough to explain his point. Fati also had an appointment related to her job in the morning, which also supported the idea of night skiing. We kept talking until 3-4 AM the Friday night. Sachin got up relatively early the next morning and did some research on ski areas in Connecticut. We did some cost distance analysis and finalized the Mt Southington ski area in Southington, which was less than an hour away and was costing us $58 per head including the first time free sessions for Fati and I.
For skiing, you basically pay for two things, the lift pass and the ski rentals. Lift pass is to use the lift to go up to the top of hill from where you come down skiing. Secondly, people like us pay the rent for skiing equipments. Skiing equipment consist of a pair of shoes that are heavy enough to make elephants uncomfortable and strong enough to fix a fractured leg; a pair of skis that are flat, thin and long plastic platforms to fit those shoes for people from Jupiter and are used to for speed and balance and a pair of pole sticks which are never used, especially initially.
In our package, we had free lessons for an hour and a half. Before we could find instructor, Sachin taught us basics, who is already an expert from my perspective. Wearing the skis was the easiest part and everything after that was a challenge. During little practice after lessons from Sachin, I was continuously loosing balance and falling down, which was both enjoyable and physically hurting. I once started slipping down a small slope with direction of my skis such that my legs got wide stretched and I fell down with my skis still on. It took me a while to find a way to get rid of the skis and straighten my legs. This was probably my longest and most strenuous stretching in my whole life and that was just the start.
After some confusion about the place where we were supposed to meet, we finally met the instructor 30 minutes later than the scheduled time. She took us up to a little slope where our formal lessons started. First few minutes were to explain the structure of ski (mostly flat with sharp edges) and it’s use. Fati was not even able to get herself on the skis because of the snow stuck to the bottom of her shoe and it took a lot of overall energy of our instructor Sandy to clean that off multiple times in that one hour.
Stopping and turning are the most important things that you should at least theoretically know before starting the practical. Forming a pizza slice shape using your skis with the tip of slice in front of you and forming a sitting posture by putting pressure on your thighs and hips were the easy ways we were told to remember how to stop and turn. The instructions were simple to learn and understand, but falling down was still our favorite method to stop as soon as the speed or imbalance scared us. The very important thing that we later realized out of this was to give away the fear of speed and stay balanced at whatever speed. You just have to keep saying to yourself that the speed can be controlled well using technique.
With skis on, it was hard to stand still. Ski was kind of my master and I slave. Ski would start moving me all of a sudden without my consent. The only way to stop being a slave was either to enjoy being it and keep doing what ski want you to or resist and hurt yourself by rolling in the snow. For a long time, I was just resisting, which didn’t work well and I learnt it the hard way. It took instructor a good effort and time (~30 minutes) to get us to stop without falling. Even after knowing the technique, using gravity and making close contact with snow was my favorite.
By the time we were finally able to successfully stop ourselves at lower speeds, we were only left with 5 minutes to learn the turning part. It’s anyways logically important to maintain balance and control speed, but another importance for me to learn it was to avoid collisions with others. The learning part was only for me, not for others and they would definitely not appreciate the idea of being hit by some 80 kilo rolling piece of mass. Turning was only slightly different from stopping. Instead of applying pressure on both skis, you just do it on the one depending on direction you want to turn. To turn right, you put pressure on left one and vice-versa. In crux, stopping and turning is all about putting pressure in right amount and posture.
During our sessions, Sachin was checking on us every 15 minutes. He was waiting to take us to the hilltop for the real fun of the day. The time finally came at 8:30 PM after an hour of instructor-led and half an hour of Sachin-led training. After an hour and a half, I was little confident about stopping but not turning.
Now was the time to start using the lift pass. That’s also a unique experience in itself. The lifts keep circling continuously up and down the small hill. The lift is like a trolley that can sit two people and what we generally refer in India as “Udan Khatola”. To get on a lift, you’ve to synchronize yourself with the lift movement. As soon as a lift leaves the boarding station, you start moving forward to catch the next one and this has to be done with your skis on. Next step is to bend yourself so that you can get on the next lift, which doesn’t actually stop. You just have to catch a running lift, as we do in India with trains and buses. It looks and sounds crazy but it works very well and the speeds are pretty slow to hurt anyone. Also, the lift stops in case of any problem there is always an attendant to help. This part was well explained and demonstrated by Sachin already, so I did fine. What came as a surprise, rather shock was to get down at the top of hill. I assumed that there would be somebody on the other end too, which of course was a bad assumption. You have to get down on your own with your skis on and that too on a slope. I once thought of going back down in the same lift, which I realized after getting down, was not an option. I finally thought of the worst case scenario and said to myself that if the ski try to master again, just resist and fall down. That might hurt a little bit, but was a good option at that time. All this happened in less than 10 seconds. To my surprise, I got down fine and was also able to stop myself within 20 feet. After I stood still, I saw the stop stick at the turning point of the lift from where it started going back down. If you couldn’t get down, your legs will definitely hit that stick and that stops the trolley for some time good enough for a person to get down.
Looking at our small hill from bottom to top didn’t look as scary as it seemed from top. Although I was a little confident on my braking skills now, I had not tried it on steep parts where speed would be much higher. Two things that kept my spirits high were:
This is simple and there is no way I’m going home without going from top to bottom successfully, without falling.
If so many people here could do it, there is no way I can’t
I started from almost very top of the hill, where I fell down a couple times without even getting a start. Finally, when I started my first descent, the speed got so high that I got scared and lost balance and demonstrated some out of control aerobatic stunts. That happened at least 2-3 times on the steep parts of that simplest hill in the ski-area. I finally decided to walk down halfway and then start from there, where also I kept failing and falling. I somehow finally reached the bottom after falling N number of times and walking down the hill at steep areas. That was definitely not a motivating start.
With all twists and turns that my body went through, it was definitely not at its best now, but whenever the thought of being physically unfit came to my mind, the devil inside me would say – “Yeah, that’s a nice excuse of not doing it, you loser”. Sachin did the same job too. But as I said earlier, there were two things that kept me going. Once I reached bottom of the hill, I now decided to go up walking halfway and ski from there. This also didn’t work well for sometime, but the rate of failure was getting lower as I was not doing the steep parts. After doing that a couple times successfully, I decided to start over from top again. I was getting better but not where I wanted to be. In next two attempts, I earned more pain for at the cost of controlling myself better. The cycle repeated thrice.
It was not until my fourth attempt that I was finally able to make it from top to bottom in one go. The speed was high enough to have all my hairs aligned with the wind. That very moment when I stopped at the base was triumphant and gave me a sense of achievement. It reminded me the day when I was first able to ride a bike by myself. “Yes, I did it” were my first words and those were very much visible in my physical action too. I realized in a moment that the body movement with the feeling was not a good idea. At least my skis didn’t like it and I stumbled, but somehow managed to stand still. That was at 9:35 PM and our pass was to expire at 10:00 PM. In those 25 minutes, I did it again four times and in my final attempt, I was able to control my direction as well. I stopped very near to where I wanted to. Not only was it fun, it was a new thing that I learnt, it was thrilling, adventurous and needless to say triumphant. As I’m writing the experience two days later, I still feel it in most parts of my body. :-)
The part I missed was to take pictures for which I’ll go back to some ski area some time soon. I’ll hopefully do few steeper hills this time with better control on myself.
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