Tree skiing and control

Skiing the trees can be super fun, especially on days when the weather or visibility are bad and when it’s snowing and blowing hard. 

Then, in that sheltered environment, especially if the terrain is steep, obstacles (trees, stumps, rocks) come super fast on the skier and skiing well requires a combination of high-level concentration, creative line planning, fast moves and constant control. 

The latter is extremely important as skiing the trees is rarely a “first-track” situation. In most cases they can be already many tracks, fast rounded ruts and a uniformly accelerated pace that lead to loss of control. 

That implies that there is no stop-and-go skiing, and as the name of the game implies, an interrupted series of turn during the whole run. That’s the way I still can strive to ski and the way I’m doing it when I’m skiing alone. 

The reason I bring the subject up, is that as I’m growing older I’m not as quick as I once was, and need to bring more control to my skiing, returning forward more completely, faster, and keeping up with the rhythm I’d like to maintain. 

This might translate on average into a slower pace, but that’s precisely what I must work on. 

Finally, if I’ve lost you with my convoluted comments, just ignore that blog!

Feeding our future with vision

Just like our bodies, our future must be continuously fed with a road-map that we create as we move along. 

That’s right, we need to continually dream, envision and set up the stage for what comes next, no matter how old or demotivated we are to do so.

It comes down to filling up the pipeline and making damned sure that it’s always ready with the seeds of events we want to see bloom. 

When we are young, we have dreams, projects, aspirations, but as we grow older these plans for the future begin to dry up and bring us to the brink of saying: “We’ve got nothing to look forward to anymore...” 

Sad, isn’t it? So the idea of “Feeding Our Future” (FOF) is as crystal clear as it’s simple, we need to constantly nourish the beast. 

The reality is that it’s more difficult to plan and more complicated to implement than it always appear! 

This is just a basic concept. More about it soon...

A long weekend with my grandson

Yesterday, my 12 year old grandson came to spend five days with us, and of course he’ll be skiing a lot with his grandpa. 

We expect lots of new snow, so this should be a terrific long weekend. 

Yesterday, we skied a lot on some gnarly terrain, ended up hiking on some slopes, and we plan to continue the next four days. 

We simply hope that the ski runs we'll go to won’t be too crowded during this popular February weekend… 

What a privilege to ski with a young skier filled with enthusiasm, vitality and an open-mind. 

Hopefully, all that positive energy will spill on me!

Ligety says goodbye to ski racing

At age 36, it was only a matter of time until Ted Ligety decide to quit racing and focus on his young family and his “Shred” business. 

Champions come and go, but Ligety has a track record that remains impressive as he marked World Cup with his innovative technique, his dominance of giant slalom for years, and a solid 15 year career with the US ski team. 

Just as a reminder his results speak for themselves: 

•  Two Olympic gold medals Seven World Championship medals including five gold.
• A string of three-straight World Championship GS gold medals – a feat never before accomplished! 
• Six small World Cup crystal globes (five GS, one combined).
• 25 World Cup wins, 52 podiums in 336 starts.

Happy and productive retirement, Ted! 

Also, don’t forget to fully enjoy your beautiful family and appreciate Park City will offer you during all your years of retirement from competitive skiing!

The avalanche quandary

Is there a science behind understanding what causes avalanche? Perhaps, but that’s not all that’s necessary to avoid getting caught into one, in my opinion. 

Then, is there an art in not getting caught into one? Yes, and that one’s called pure luck. 

With already two casualties this season in Park City, 21 in the United States and on Monday a 45 years old, famous Italian mountain climber Carlo Alberto Cimenti, who got caught and died in another avalanche in Sestriere, I would say that there’s only one good method for surviving such a fate, it’s plenty of good common sense, extreme prudence and still a good modicum of good luck. 

Another one, of course, is to avoiding playing in the back-country. All the other good reasons for trying to justify the hapless victims of most avalanche unfortunately don’t wash and shouldn’t be considered part of a reliable road map before embarking into some unknown mass of snow… 

The forever little boy in me…

There’s a huge, mischievous part of me, that’s from my boyhood days, that keeps my forward-looking, curious and always ready to embark on new adventures of all sorts. 

It’s a spirit that I like, that renews itself and remains always fresh and bubbly. 

Is it my inside engine, my constant drive? I’d say yes and the more I notch years along the long path of my life, I cherish him more than ever before and want to keep him, fresh and energized along my side for the rest of my ride...

Trump, America’s exhaust pipe

I heard on the radio how about profoundly divided families were over Trump and Trumpism. 

That caused me to think that the reasons of Trump’s appeal, among “deplorable” folks that still support him, is that he gave them total agency to accomplish, think and validate terrible deeds, like storming the Capitol and trying to kill member of Congress, lying egregiously, finding truth in conspiracy theories and being racist among other misdeeds. 

“My president told me it was okay to act like this” being the umbrella excuse for misbehaving and following dictator Trump’s orders. 

In society, morality, religion, laws, taboos and accepted order keep people from going haywire and it took a Donald Trump to tap into these repressed outlawed or nefarious tendencies among the general population.

A population that defines democracy by being solely surrounded by individuals who think or act like themselves and most importantly resemble them. That’s why Trump, in my view, is our country’s exhaust pipe, a highly toxic one at that, and in a more physiological way, acts more like America’s anus.