Replying to Essay on "Why I Ski"

Why I Ski

            At a very young age, around three or four, I was handed my first pair of skis: Noisy yellow Salomon Scream’s, about 130 cm high. I was then put through five grueling years of “hup two three four” boot camp style ski lessons. When I truly learned to ski was at the age of eight when I raced. From then on all that filled my stream of consciousness was skiing. Soon after I found out about Lego’s and completely forgot bout skiing for several years. Finally, when I was 15 I found out how much skiing truly meant to me.

I have always skied for as long as I have known, almost all of my normal memories can be found between the millions of reminicsnint skiing experiences that fill my brain. Born in a heavily skiing influenced family (Mom skid on the U.S. Ski Team) and the second to last boy in a family of four boys, it was hard to find something unique, something different that my two ‘role models’ ahead of me already hadn’t done. Within skiing I found a feeling not felt since my first viewing of The Sandlot, since my first taste of a Little Debbie product, since my first hearing of Forever Changes. A feeling that some never capture in a lifetime. Most think that in skiing I found an escape, a cookie cutter place to leave the monotonous drone of everyday life that everyone looks to escape. But what I found was so much more; these four reasons why I ski are so much more:

Pure Pleasure. The push to be innovative while still having fun, the desire to capture your own unique amounts of hilarity and skill into ‘edits’, the acceptance into a high-spirited community. Very few get to experience racing friends down a dangerously steep mountain, every thought pushing you 5 mph upwards. Rarely does someone get to find pleasure in the completeness of linking a formulaically impossible combination, from spinning downwards onto a thin rail to changing directions and idea and changing back again before you are even off. And no one can experience the sensation you have, the inner aura you find when you rush off the lip of a jump with an 8f ft ice gap between you and a torn acl. This is dangerous and scary enough then you harshly grip the metallic edges of your ski and rip your body in a spinning motion only to stop after 900 degrees and land it all back wards with a comedic amount of style known to many in the community as ‘afterbang’.