Can you teach yourself to ski?

“Teach yourself to ski” is actually the title of a book by Georges Joubert, a Frenchman who immersed himself into state-of-the-art ski technique mostly inspired by champions. Today, I’m going to discuss self-teaching as a way to making real progress in skiing. Between the ages of 20 and 27 I actively taught skiing, both in the French and Australian Alps. I took that job so seriously that I probably burnt out by immersing myself too much into the endeavor. By the time I received my full French ski instructor certification; I was pedagogically advanced and could have become a big fish in that small pound if I had stuck it out. The ten years that followed were hard on me, not because I plunged with both feet into the ski industry, but because the sport of skiing moved away from me as I lived far away from my beloved slopes. This hiatus gave me the opportunity to intellectualize the sport even more, and when I seriously caught up with it in 1985, I had a series of epiphanies that made many ski mysteries crystal-clear to me. From that point forward, I started to make some remarkable progress both with my own technique and my understanding of the sport. You might say that the equipment revolution helped me greatly in that regard, but I would respectfully disagree with that assertion. I just worked hard at becoming better, and it worked beyond my wildest dreams. Today at age sixty, I still can keep us with a large number of "twenty-something;" if you don’t quite believe it, come ski with me!