Flat Sticks

I hate skiing. Is hate too strong a word? Not in this case, but I guess that you could say I dislike it. With a fiery, blazing inferno of passion...

Why would you do this? Courtesy of Uriel Heilman.

I just don’t get it anymore. What is fun about attaching flat sticks to your feet while wearing special, extremely uncomfortable boots? And then sliding down a hill? I guess that sliding down a hill is fine, but I would prefer to do that without the flat sticks.

If you were wondering why I said “anymore” in the first sentence of the above paragraph, I used to like skiing. In fact, I loved skiing. I would race the other members of my family down the hill and we would have great fun, then meet midday with a cup of hot chocolate in the lodge, and another when we got home that night. That was when I was seven.

I’m not sure what happened in the later years of my life. I stopped skiing to switch over to snowboarding with my brother, and didn’t really like it too much. However, I kept snowboarding for a few years, before going back to skiing. The problem was, when I went back to skiing, I hated it.

Now, this was in part because my personality is quite cautious, so therefore whenever I am going to do something new, I wait (sometimes a long time) until I know that I probably won’t get hurt. Then I do it.

This was evident in learning how to ride a bike. When I had training wheels, I was happy to ride. But when my parents offered to take the tiny lifelines off, I refused. I wanted to know that I was safe riding that bike. But then, according to my mother, one day I realized I would be just fine without them, and went up to her and said, “I’m ready.” Off the training wheels went, and I rode perfectly fine without them.

However, that isn’t the only reason. I also just don’t find a need to ski. To me, the winter means staying inside with a warm mug of hot chocolate and a fire. It doesn’t mean going out into the cold to slide down a mountain.

I’m bringing this up mainly because I went skiing over the break. For the first time in many years. I went to Park City Mountain Resort on Friday because I wanted to see if I still hated it or if I changed my mind. I hadn’t. I stopped after taking two runs, and then returning to the car. However, I realized that I still disliked it after getting to the top of Payday lift and going down the catwalk to the right.

And I don’t dislike it because I’m horrible at it. I don’t mean to brag, I didn’t do anything good enough to deserve bragging rights, but I was quite good for going back to it after multiple years. I mean, yes, my mother and sister were yelling at me to hurry up, and that they didn’t even know how it was possible to ski that slowly, but man, I knew how to serpentine down that hill. For a tiny bit of a beginner, at least. It’s just that I never want to actually point my ski tips straight down the hill for more than a second. 

Maybe someday in life I will go back to skiing and like it, or even love it. But not anytime soon.