Skiing

I love skiing. I'm very late to winter sports. (Winter itself is nothing new, having grown up with the long, cold, snowy midwestern variety.) I first started learning to snowboard at age 37, 6 years ago. I was terrible at it. I loved being up in the mountains and greatly enjoyed the holidays, but after years of still being crap at the sport I decided to try skiing. Starting in January of 2008, 41 now, I launched myself at the skiing attempt. To my surprise I was much less incompetent at it than boarding. By the end of my second season I was pretty comfortable, if graceless, on a lot of the mountain, and really enjoying the pistes. Now I'm starting my third season looking forward to more improvement.

Like a lot of sports, skiing is one in which having the skill lets you take it as easy or push yourself as hard as you want. It can be hard work in any condition before the skills are there, but once they are, you can cruise pretty much forever. In the alps, I've seen and met quite a few senior citizens still out there gliding down the slopes. Their rugby days are over, certainly, but they're still out there skiing.

A more geeky pleasure of skiing is the technology to get you up the mountain. The engineers really get to flaunt. Not only are mechanisms of lifts and gondolas and cable cars usually exposed, but they almost always clearly post facts and figures -- weight, capacity, throughput, speed, thickness/strength of cabling, etc. I'd love to see this more commonly practiced around machinery of other types. I suspect these lift designers have a competitive streak. There's no real explanation for, say, the gondola in St. Anton that gets lifted at the base station from ground level up to a higher exit level on a giant wheel, other than that they did it because they could. Clearly showing off. And it's brilliant.



On a more personal scale, the equipment is a lot of fun. I'm still figuring out what things need to have money spent on them and what don't. For me, the jacket is in the latter category. I made do for years with a big blue raincoat, and have just replaced it with a weatherproof shell from eddie bauer I got on sale over the summer in the US ridiculously cheap. It's not a ski jacket, but it has pockets in all the right places, and keeps the water and wind out. It cost, literally, 1/10th the price of a decent "ski" jacket. Ideally it would be just slightly longer and the sleeve openings would be a bit wider, but other than that it's quite the steal. It's not insulated, which I prefer anyway, as I layer depending on the weather.


Ski pants seem worth the price, up to a point. I had a decent pair of boarding pants that took me through boarding and then skiing but finally had to be retired. Now I've moved on to a nice pair of salomon ski pants that are very comfortable and so far fitting the bill perfectly. There may be bargains at the cheap end of the market, but most of what I looked at in the lower price range seemed flimsy and/or shoddy. In the middle of the market there are a lot of choices that look quite good, quality-wise. Of course, there are ludicrously expensive options as well. Yes, the £400 ski pants seem very nice, but until I'm spending 15+ weeks per year skiing, they are not worth it.

Socks: definitely worth it. I love falke socks. For the torso, I usually go with a cotton t-shirt to start. An entire generation of recreational athletes, at least in the US, has been convinced by successful marketing campaigns that wearing cotton during anything strenuous will result in certain hypothermia or death by heat stroke, or possibly both, and that only "technical" fabrics are acceptable. I wear cotton year-round for all sorts of things and despite this shocking display of risk-taking have yet to suffer calamity. On top of that, I do upgrade to merino wool, in particular I've found the icebreaker stuff to be excellent, and worth the money. One or two layers of wool in between the cotton and the outer jacket handles a broad range of winter coldness as long as my extremities are warm. The helmet works well until it gets really cold, at with point a skullcap or a facemask with hood works great under the helmet. I also wear wool leggings if it's really cold.

Gloves I'm undecided on. Cheap gloves seem to work great for day 1, then are miserable to try to put on the next morning. But gloves can lead a hard life. I suspect the middle of the market is the place to go here. With goggles I think fit is the important thing. I'm a little skeptical of the various anti-fog claims of some types of goggles. Some people have the ability to fog up any goggles, regardless, while others' remain clear no matter what. I've broken a lot of goggles though, mostly when snowboarding and falling on my face, hard, so I still have a vestigial reluctance to spend a lot of money on them. They don't seem to last long in any case.

Helmets: I wear one all the time. It won't save me from catastrophic decceleration into a tree or a boulder, but it will keep my skull from getting sliced open under the edge of the idiot boarder or skiier who's out of control. And it keeps my head warm, and vents well when it gets warmer. Definitely worth the money on a comfortable one that fits well.

Boots: the first best upgrade from rental gear, even before skis. Makes a huge difference in comfort. Fit is far more important than brand. Skis are the next best upgrade. It's been great skiing on my own skis and not having to get used to a new kind every trip. I look forward to outgrowing them and needing new ones.