my ski lesson

I had a ski lesson on Thursday with a guy named Joe at Copper.

It was a good investment. Joe was pretty laid back, but that got annoying some times. He asked me what my goal was for the lesson. I explained to him that I needed to learn to ski better. But then he kept asking me what I wanted to learn. Finally I said "Look, I want to learn to suck less when I ski". That answer seemed to satisfy him.

We did a number of drills which were pretty hard for me. One involved getting up on my edges and then flattening my skis and sliding down hill. I could do that okay when my left foot was uphill but had a hard time doing it with my right foot uphill. Because I don't have much feeling at all in my right foot after my knee surgery I can't always tell when I'm on my ski edge.

Then he watched me ski down a hill and said that I'm turning with my shoulders instead of my feet. So I did a lot of work on trying to transition on my edges and turn with my feet. Joe would usually ski behind me and yell at me when I did something wrong.

Then I practiced J turns. I can do a J turn to the left but not the right. I need to learn how to sense that my edge is down even if I can't feel it. After I did my turns Joe would mark up my turn line to show me where I did something wrong, like shifting my weight back instead of staying forward (Jeffy calls that the "Franki taking a dump" position). I started getting obsessed with my lines. Joe finally told me to quit "geeking out" about my lines. He also said most instructors use the big toe to little toe method for teaching people how to shift from one edge to the other, but since I can't feel my little toe that doesn't work for me.

Joe gave me an exercise to do at home, which I tried to do when I was staying with Jeffy except that he kept laughing at me. The exercise involves turning the feet to the left and right, so that the heel and toe make an "x". You're supposed to do it on wood floors and do it on carpet once you're really good. I couldn't make an x at all with my right foot at first because my heel was lifting out of the snow. Hopefully doing the x exercise will help with my right leg issues.

We ended the lesson doing some jumps and bumps.

After the lesson I decided to blow off the guy I was supposed to go have a drink with to keep skiing. Since I had a much better idea of how to control my skis I decided to do some more bumps and jumps. It was kind of weird, like having this magical super skiing power. That was probably the best afternoon of skiing I've had, though I think I over did it because Friday my knee really really hurt.

One weird thing that happened...I was at the american flyer lift and this kid who had been scanning my pass all day (I doubt he was out of college) jumped over the little fence that separates the ski line from the lift. I was standing on the purple line waiting for the chair to come around. I was one of only 5 people still skiing on that lift. The kid hit this button that shut the lift off. I turned around to look at him and he said "I have to ask you a question. How come you always smile at me but you never say anything?" I was like "Um, I smile at everyone dude." Then his friends started laughing. I'm not sure what exactly they were up to, but the kid running the lift started yelling at the pass scanning guy because once you stop the lift you have to wait a certain period of time before you can turn it back on. So we all sat there in awkward silence waiting until the lift could be turned back on. Then I decided to stay on super bee for the rest of the day.

And, this couple that swings propositioned me on super bee (I rode on the lift with them a number of times that afternoon and I chatted with the wife as the lift was going up - the husband propositioned me the last lift trip before super bee closed). I never know how to respond to stuff like that except by saying something stupid like "Um, no thanks".