These past two days, my family and I went skiing at Loveland Ski Area in central Colorado, a few hours from our home. My daughters — one in particular! — have been begging to go for a few years, and we finally made it work schedule-wise and financially this year. It was a great trip, and I came away from it thinking about just how incredible human beings are.
Elayne is almost 14, Katherine almost 12, and neither had ever been skiing before. In fact, neither had even put on skis before Wednesday morning, shortly before their lessons began. By the end of the first day, though, they were fairly comfortable going down the “bunny slope” and confident riders of a ski lift. (Credit to Loveland’s ski school instructors!)
Yesterday, instead of doing more lessons, we just spent the morning hanging out on the bunny slope together.
When we started, neither had successfully gotten off the ski lift without falling. On our second run, I encouraged them to try not to fall when getting off — nothing more than that encouragement — and they succeeded. By an hour in, they were ready to (indeed, asked to) do a ride on the lift and run on the bunny slope by themselves. Both of them did the steep side of the bunny slope before the morning was out. One of them spent a couple hours after lunch by herself — the other was sufficiently tuckered out that she just read instead, which was also fine.
This is amazing! We take it for granted because people do this kind of thing all the time, but it’s amazing. They went from never having done the activity at all to being able to do it comfortably and with a basic level of competence in a handful of hours.
I grew up skiing; I think I was 5 years old the first time I went. For the first many years I was skiing, we went one or two days a year as a family, and sometimes also a day trip with church friends. When I was in high school, we were able to up that to going
This kind of skill development should be stunning. We take it for granted because it is just how human beings are. It is what we do, all the time. But a few hundred hours scattered across a decade and a half being sufficient to develop that kind of skill is remarkable, in the sense that it is worth remarking upon. Both for how little time it is, relatively speaking, and for the fact that our bodies and minds can remember across those spans of time. You don’t come back to the mountain having lost all the skills you built the previous year. Indeed: you have to warm up a bit and remind yourself of what you know, but you still know it. The skills are somehow all still there, waiting to be reengaged and then built upon further.
Even more amazingly, this holds across decades of time away.
When I strapped on the skis on Wednesday, I had skied exactly twice since graduating college almost seventeen years ago: once seven years ago, and once eight years before that. It took me a few hours to get my legs back under me (and the terrible conditions weren’t helping!) but by late morning, I was skiing decently-difficult blue runs and even cutting down a black bowl at the very top of the mountain. By late yesterday, I was back to cutting down mogully blues while dodging the trees and rocks sticking out of the ground from the too-thin snow cover. Not as good as I was in late high school, but not that far off, either. If I ski a few days next season, I expect to have it all back.1
Human beings are amazing creatures. “You never forget how to ride a bike” is a truism that we think little of, when in fact it should stun us. We should marvel more at what we can do — at how quickly and well we can learn new things, and at how we can remember them at the remove of even decades.
Notes
It will be different than it was back then, because I am older. That comes with a host of changes. My body is less resilient in some ways; it requires greater care. But it is also stronger in many ways, from 15 years of running and now a growing foundation of core strength. My mind, meanwhile, is a far greater asset now than it was back then. I have learned to be a student of the sports I engage in, for one. For another, those years of running have helped me learn how to attend to my body well.
I realized yesterday that my boots don’t fit well, and could articulate exactly how. It took me only a little bit of study to understand how my boots aren’t serving me well. I will need a good bootfitter to help me fix that, but I am also very confident it is fixable. Looking back, I suspect that I had these kinds of problems off and on the entire time I was growing up. Some years, no doubt, the rentals fit just right; others, not so much. But I did not have the bodily self-awareness to articulate any of that back then, and now I do. ↩︎