Where was my mentor when I needed one?

Like many folks, I guess, I would have love to have a series of mentors throughout my life, showing me the ins and outs of navigating my path without wasting opportunities. 

This wasn’t totally the case, if I except Monsieur Losserand, my grade school teacher who discovered at least one talent in me and helped me nurture it. 

I also think that I was in very good company, with a great number of buddies who were sharing that same predicament. So without crying over spilled milk, what does this tell me and the rest of us?

Quite simply that we ought to look for opportunities to mentor young people whenever we can. Sure, that’s a lot easier said than done, but it’s definitely something to keep in the front of our minds, while we last...

Ski trail reconnaissance

If you take your family, friends or clients skiing if you are an instructor or a guide, you owe it to him and yourself, to precisely know where you are taking them. 

This simple precaution will prevent a lot of headaches, bad feeling and many accidents. Don’t just follow any track! 

That’s become a rule whenever I decide to take a family member who skis with me in places that are unknown to them and far from routine to them and myself. 

I only wish I had made a habit of it long before now. I check the area first, figure out suitable lines or itinerary where I’ll be able to guide them with minimum apprehension on their part and well within their technical abilities.

This is not only meant to help folks you’re in charge of, but also yourself, as there always are some valuable teaching moments in observing and thinking through a place that might be complex or unfamiliar...

When I used to hate physical education

When I was a kid in junior-high, physical education was very basic, not to say crude. I remember three things we had to do: Run, high-jump and rope-climb. 

These were the tests that determined a young person fitness or lack thereof. I couldn’t run because I got side-stitch, I couldn’t high-jump or rope-climb because my efforts were grossly uncoordinated and no one, among my teachers, had the imagination to try to coach and correct me. 

For these failures, I was labeled as incompetent and was so humiliated that I came to hate physical ed and considered myself a failure in sports. 

Talk about bad self-image that my PE instructors kept on drilling on me, without even trying to address my personal understanding of what I was supposed to do. 

It’s only when I was in high school that, one day, we went to climb a nearby hill called Mont Chevran, around the small city of Cluses, France, where almost miraculously, as I finally was back in my natural element, I was first of my class to make it to the top. 

I finally broke the spell of being a klutz and it finally opened the door to a rather physically active rest of my life.

The challenge of skiing one’s age…

I just skied my age for this season; 73 days out and I’m just 73! I had a great time, the snow was perfect and I did some of my favorite runs for the first time this season.

While this was easy enough, it required my skiing almost everyday when conditions were decent, so as I’m moving in age, I’m beginning to get concerned. There’s a point in a non-so distant future when this silly practice will become a big challenge. 

Can you imagine a 100 year old having to ski 100 times in a season? Better remain in tip-top shape? This is also while I don’t think it’s such a good idea to extend life beyond what’s considered “normal” these days. 

I would not want to have to live to be 150 years old and have to ski as many days, especially as the planet is warming fast and snow is bound to disappear even faster!

Trumps stunning numbers are in!

A couple days ago, the United States broke the 500,000 death from Covid-19, a lasting testimony of Trumps terrible crisis-management skills. 

Okay, I won’t mention the Belgians, Brits and Spaniards that have scored even worse than us. Granted, George W. Bush had 500,000 Iraqis killed because of his ill-conceived war, but these were foreigners, and to be fair to the Donald, he wasn’t able to do as bad in terms of total human toll. 

We can only say that he’s responsible for a good 300,000 of our domestic pandemic deaths, if we were to compare us to Canada, and logically assume that our neighbor to the North is culturally and economically comparable to our Great Country. 

Of course, we’re not trying to compare us to Germany, in which case, Trumps personal liability would jump to over 400,000 deaths; that’s a lot of blood on our ex-dictator “small hands”. 

Too bad too few folks in the media remind us of that horrible reality...

My life’s big regret

If I’m lucky to have very few regrets, I have one that’s enormous. It’s been not to have kept a journal from the day I was able to write and still remembered enough of my early life when I didn’t know how to put it down to paper. 

I always try to remember things, but they seem to be drifting farther and farther away, to the point that I often make a conscious effort to committing them to writing them down now, while there still is a figment of freshness and truth to them! 

Since around 2007, I have begun recording the daily facts and moods of my life and unfortunately, if I had kept much tighter and certain memories starting from that point on, the preceding ones have, and are still fading away, victim of the corrosive effect to time. 

There is no question that as years pass, memories become much duller except for those triggered by huge emotional upheavals, and still, these get corrupted too with the passage of time. 

So, if I have an advice to give to anyone, it’s to start keeping a journal today, no matter what your age and stage in life are, and organize whatever represents your memories so you can retrieve them before there’s no good storage room left in your overcrowded brain!

Ski racing and me…

I have not been watching any alpine ski race for beginning to end this winter as I had in the recent past. Perhaps, this is because we had no American World Cup events because of Covid-19, but also because there was no major, dominant champion to warrant my attention. 

For years, I was not much of a regular watcher of ski competitions. About 10 years ago, Miller, Ligety, Vonn and Shiffrin got me more interested, as well as Richard, a French skier from my hometown valley, and got me to become a more regular spectator again. 

When I could – because of a 8 hour time difference - I continued with sporadically watching the dual Hirscher-Kristofferson and Shiffrin dominant seasons, then this winter, I’ve only read the results and watched a few single runs by the day’s winner or some spectacular falls or save, like France’s Muzaton, and that was it.

Is my reaction a bit chauvinistic? Probably so. This said, I saved a lot of time, given the repetitive and uniform nature of ski racing, don’t feel to have missed much and will probably continue curtailing my ski racing screen time in future seasons!