NOT QUITE PAST IT

Ahh, jeez. Ouch. My knees creak as I twist gingerly out of bed, the pain in them piercing through the clouds of my hangover and my poor night’s sleep.

“How much wine did we have with the steaks?” I ask myself.

Too much for sure.

Skiing is supposed to be my thing, a part of how I’ve defined myself for most of a lifetime. I have, at times, been very good at it, yet now I contemplate the prospect of a second day on the mountains with all the enthusiasm of the unfit school kid contemplating a forced cross-country run.

Despite having managed to stay with my friends most of yesterday, I don’t want any part of this today.

Glowering at my unfit, overweight self in the bathroom mirror, I remember last night’s dinner conversation: one of the guys was training for a 50 mile hill run, another climbed Mont Blanc last year, a third is planning to cycle some Tour de France stages in the spring.

What The Actual Fuck am I doing here?

It takes three coffees from the Nespresso machine downstairs to get me out of the door and I slump in the corner of the ski lift, feeling out of place amongst my younger, fitter companions.

The first run of the day is chosen by the guy whose house we are staying in, the one who did Mont Blanc. It’s a black run.

Of course it’s a fucking black run.

I take my time tightening up my boots and adjusting my goggles, trying to summon reserves of energy whose existence I don’t really believe in. Reluctantly, with neither enthusiasm nor expectation, I commit myself to the slope.

50 years of muscle memory somehow kicks in and causes me to unweight my skis, turn through the fall line and sink down onto them again, my knees searching for purchase on the steep slope. The sharpened steel edges bite into the frosty corduroy of the machine-prepared piste and make the turn.

Looking for better control, I roll my knees slightly into the hill and transfer more weight onto my skis. The stiff wooden cores respond, pushing hard back at me and I use their spring to initiate the next turn.

And, in that instant, I am a skier again.

One turn leads into another, developing into a steady rhythm that controls my descent. This is not the free flowing, apparently effortless skiing that I might seek later in the day or on an easier run. This is precise. This is controlled. This is technical. No one watching would be in any doubt that the shape of each turn is not a random coincidence of piste, and snow and skis, but something of my very exact design.

I ski the whole slope this way, turn after turn after turn, mastering it, showing it no hint of my earlier weakness. I am indistinguishable from the younger, fitter men on either side of me.

By the end, the cold, mountain air has worked its magic and once more, I am alive; once more, I’m in control of my body and my mind.

Once more, I’m happy for this to be part of how I define myself.

 

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The truth is, I am struggling a bit here and had to take some time out this afternoon. At my age, you have to prepare for this sort of thing and, while I started, full of good intent, back in October, a succession of colds and, if I’m honest, lack of motivation got in the way. However I’m enjoying this enough to realise I’m far from ready to give it up, so *may* have been heard using the oldest refrain in skiing:

“Next year I’m going to get fit!”