The French have a name that captures the particular thrill of snow sports—la glisse, the act of gliding. To glide is to not quite touch the earth but to hover over it. It is an earthy version of flying, if such a thing can exist. I came to skiing at age 47. I could have done it so much earlier—I moved to Boulder in 2000, when I was 32. But the speed of la glisse intimidated me, as did the expense, the gear, all of it. I was in a steady relationship with yoga, my favorite squeeze. Then I had two kids and my kids wanted to ski.
I remember the day I feel in love with skiing so clearly. We were in Vail, where my kids were signed up to get a free lesson each, part of a Colorado Epic SchoolKids program to induct the younger generations into snow sports. My husband, a snow boarder, had wrangled a discounted buddy pass lift ticket. My plan was to snowshoe, but then I had a dream about skiing and something in that vision persuaded me to get a lesson. Plus, when we woke up snow was falling—already I could sense the magic of a powder day.
Cheap it wasn’t. By the time I paid for my lift ticket, my group lesson, rented my gear, paid for a locker, we were in the $300s. It felt incredibly, painfully extravagant.
But then I was up the mountain, learning to wedge, figuring out how to take wide jay turns. In the empty runs, with the snow falling on the pines, was a slice of heaven I had not imagined for myself.
In that moment a ski bum was born. Which was not to say I did not have a lot of learning ahead of me, to work through and with my fear. I was still getting gripped on blues. But if I was going to do this ski thing, I was going to do it right. I didn’t want to settle for getting by, trailing my kids. I wanted something else. I wanted to meet my fear and overcome. I wanted nothing less than mastery.
It may be hard to understand why people are so obsessed with skiing. Yes, it’s addictive, but it also has something more than adrenaline. The best description I have read is in this essay by Louisa Thomas commemorating the writer James Salter, who wrote frequently about skiing. Thomas writes, “In fact Salter writes about skiing the way he writes about sex: as something luminous, clean, somehow moral. This was a few years ago, when I was obsessed with skiing; I thought about it all the time. In Salter I sensed a sympathetic hunger, the longing for something transcendent, pointless, permanent, and always vanishing.”
Skiing can fill you with what Salter calls an “immense, unequaled happiness” that’s more than the sum of a series of dazzling turns. It touches our desire for beauty, courage, obsession, and yes, mastery. It is a private, ongoing battle with limits and failure; it is an intermittent immersion in awe. With awe comes devotion. It also comes with a lion’s share of teachable moments.
Here’s a few surprising life lessons that skiing has taught me.
1. Slay your fear dragons
One of my ski instructors, Lori Beach, who I met through a women’s ski program at Eldora (a ski resort in Colorado), would talk about slaying our fears on the slopes. It was not that you would ignore the fear, or dismiss it, but that by going down the slope, turn by turn, you would face the fear directly. And that the fear was not something to be ashamed of—which is why women-led ski instruction is so impactful. Women understand women’s fear in a way that men try to mansplain away, often through dismissal. There’s nothing like staring down a slope whose pitch seems outrageously steep to realize, as Eleanor Roosevelt said, “You gain strength, courage, and confidence by every experience in which you really stop to look fear in the face. You must do the thing which you think you cannot do.”
2. Don’t play the age card
You are not too old. Ski industry experts say it’s never too late to start, as long as you don’t have a debilitating health issue that your doctor says is definitely a winter sports “no-go.” Of course, you will get a lot of sympathetic nods if you play the age card, because you are letting yourself and those around off the hook. The hook is really what Roosevelt says is “looking fear in the face.” And that’s a hook that deep down, we all know we actually want to be on.
3. Open to the pleasure
Skiing teaches me again and again on the other side of fear, once you cross over, is unimaginable happiness. Kim Reichhelm, a former ski racer and two-time World Extreme Skiing Champion, who was another of my ski guides through her Ski with Kim Adventure, described her passion for the sport. “I feel so alive when I ski. There’s nothing better than wind in your face. The sense of dancing down the mountain is all encompassing, so many emotions being fired, including the excitement of risk. And you don’t have to be an amazing skier to experience that, you can enjoy it at any level. Then, at the end of the day that tingling body high, the euphoria mingled with tiredness—this is the true après ski.”
4. Ask for help
Don’t expect to intuit skiing, magically entering a state of flow and “feeling the slope.” Skiing is an extremely technical sport. There are fundamentals and logical progressions that in time will make you a better skier. It’s not something you just figure out on your own most of the time. So set yourself up for success. Take lessons. Ask people to demonstrate and teach you what they know. And as you get better, follow in the tracks of good skiers, emulating their turns and rhythms as a way of embedding their skills in your own body. Asking for help, (rather than being a victim of helplessness), in any area of your life—relationships, parenting, grief, health issues, etc.—is a wonderful way to practice self-kindness.
5. Go gently into the edges of your comfort zone
Don’t have unrealistically high expectations of your skiing progress. No one learns to ski black diamonds in a day. It takes years of skiing in different conditions, on different terrain, and learning to use the equipment, to become fluent in la glisse. Rather than pushing yourself to do something you are not ready for, feel free to experiment gradually, especially in a supportive environment. For women, women-centric ski clinics and camps are a great way to advance their snow sport ability, in part because of the camaraderie they generate. “To leap outside your comfort zone,” says Reichhelm, “you have to first be comfortable and have a good rapport with your instructors. I don’t push people. I invite them to ask themselves if they are ready—and then to trust their own readiness.”
6. Be O.K. with good enough
So at age 50, the chances of me becoming an Olympic skier are slim to none. But there is worth in becoming decent at something—even if you will never be a contender. As the writer Jennifer Weiner recently wrote in an essay about relearning the piano in the New York Times, “ I don’t know if it’s that I’m creating new neural pathways, or if engrossing myself in something new and difficult just makes it hard to think of anything else. But I have come to believe in the value of doing something where I know I will never be better than O.K.”
7. Embrace the growth mindset on the fall line
Had I not learned to ski, it would have been a major victory for the fixed mindset: The belief that my qualities are fixed traits and therefore cannot change. I would have done yoga till the cows came home, believing I was not an extreme sports person, that I would never vanquish my fear of hurtling myself downhill. Thankfully the growth mindset, the underlying belief that learning and intelligence can grow with time and experience, wedged itself into my skis and would not be shaken off. Yes, I have failed—and fallen–on the fall line, the steepest line down the mountain. But those failures are themselves a victory, the proof that failing is something not to avoid but to embrace. The “growth” is recognizing that the risk of not trying—whatever your own version of the fall line—is much more painful than the risk it takes to glide.
Author Elizabeth Marglin and her son on the slopes, attire courtesy of Obermeyer.