To describe skiers as a resilient lot wouldn’t be wrong, just woefully insufficient.
Skiers are determined to ski no matter how many battles with gravity they have lost. Many have been brutally mauled, patched back together and hustled back into the fray while their most recent wounds are still healing.
Take a good look at the x-ray decorating this page. Supplementing the efforts of what was once a normal human spinal column is a spiral staircase of what appear to be 4-inch wood screws. As repairs go, it’s not what one would consider subtle or sophisticated.
It belongs, of course, to a lifelong skier, one who until recently still suited up and sallied forth, not just to ski, but to teach skiing to the general public. This level of determination derives from a place beyond obsession, somewhere in the neighborhood of insanity.
By the way, this isn’t the only hardware that’s been welded to skeletal remains in this skier’s mortal coil. There’s a nifty metal plate anchoring the left wrist, as well. Based on the testimony I’ve received from Realskiers’ membership, any skier past the age of 50 who has had one traumatic skiing injury has most likely had several. None that I know of has ever even considered leaving the sport simply due to a concatenation of injuries.
Among the miracles of modern medicine that have made it possible for skiers to carry on are the improvements made in the field of joint replacement. It’s become a standard element in the brief autobiographies that serve as necessary prelude to any discussion about ski selection. For example, “I ski mostly in the East but take at least one trip to a western resort every winter, like to ski fast in all conditions, stand 6”1”, weigh 190 pounds, am reasonably fit and have had 3 joints replaced: two knees and a shoulder.”
The details of joint replacement are Civil-War era gruesome, but the results are usually brilliant, as in skiing without pain for the first time in decades. If there is a lesson about the advisability of joint replacement to be extracted from my correspondence, it is to stop dithering and do it.
Believe it or not, the following snapshots of injury (and recovery) are typical. The first vignette comes from an industry insider whose back “went completely south end of last winter…couldn’t walk more than 20 feet without keeling over, always hunched over, shuffling everywhere in agony. I really related to not being able to lay still in an MRI…my MRI images were shit because I just couldn’t do it even on heavy pain and muscle relaxer meds. One of the most miserable experiences in my plentiful health history.”
The fix for all this skeletal havoc was a “triple level fusion (L5-L3…probably also should have been S1, but didn’t for now), 4 discectomies and 5 laminectomies all in 1 shot.” The accumulated damage wasn’t due to “any one big incident that I recall, just years of being an idiot. I guess racing motorcycles, snowmobiling and skiing finally took its toll… Still recovering 5 months later, but I’ll be back on snow for the first time next week for some product testing.” You just can’t keep a good man down.
Another Realskiers correspondent who confessed to three spinal fusions hastened to note that these were “in addition to 5 shoulder surgeries along with 2 joint replacements and last year’s ACL replacement.” It took another Realskiers subscriber seventy years to log this litany of woe:
four knee surgeries prior to two total knee replacements, a broken neck (C7), herniated disc (L4-L5), and a separated shoulder repair, but otherwise fine.” I love the “otherwise fine,” as though all the surgeries were minor inconveniences.
As I look back on my own history of skeletal re-assembly, I consider myself lucky to have escaped with an ACL reconstruction, four laminectomies, two epidurals on C2/C3 and the lumbar fusion (L3 – L5) that I’m still nursing (PT is probably 6 weeks away). That may sound like a lot of time in the repair shop, but considering where and how I have chosen to ski over the past seven decades, I got off light.
Here’s the thing about skiing: once you experience the exhilaration and joy that skiing makes possible, you will do anything in your power to keep doing it. If all skiing had going for it was a high rate of traumatic injury, we wouldn’t be any better at recruiting fresh blood than the Amish. But properly practiced, skiing is as much about spiritual nourishment as it is technical proficiency. Skiing offers a portal to another side of ourselves, a chance to disappear into the moment, to be one with the mountain and our movements. This is why we must keep coming back. This is why we ski.
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Fit the Whole Skier
We bootfitters are naturally obsessed with feet, but the best bootfitters don’t just fit feet; they fit the whole skier. The “whole skier” includes more than just a quick survey of the lower leg and how it’s connected to the foot. It’s even more than all of the skier’s physical attributes, which include not only height and weight, but seated posture, stance, kinesthetic wiring, arch health and stiffness throughout the kinetic chain; the whole skier also includes his or her history with the sport and, most importantly, what sort of skier he or she wants to be.
One of the most obvious traits about almost all boot customers is his or her gender. (Please forgive me if I don’t overcomplicate what should be a simple point about body type.) The first step in a sales process that consists of winnowing all possible boots down to one is picking from the pile of unisex boots or the alternative world of women’s boots.
No-brainer, right? Not so fast. What if a particular woman were tall, with a long tibia and a tapered calf? Let’s add to her profile that she’s a good athlete with a background in dance. Up to now, she’s only been an occasional skier who rented her gear, but a new beau has persuaded her to take a deeper dive. She already has her season pass.
The Things We Do for Love
Dear Readers who regularly devour my weekly Revelations know that I have already written at length on the subject of Why Skiers Are Better than Everyone Else. Last Friday I was reminded of my timeless prose as I spent 45 minutes traversing a very short stretch of road that connects I-80 to Route 89, my proscribed path to Alpine Meadows. As I voluntarily descended into this automotive miasma, I could make out the dim form of the interstate traffic snaking down from the west, two dense strands of tightly linked vehicles stretching beyond the horizon.
Realskiers.com Trounces Field to Earn Second Stump-Bertoni Prize for Excellence
In a stunning upset that in retrospect appears inevitable, Realskiers.com has been awarded The Stump-Bertoni Prize for Excellence for the second year in a row.
For those cave-dwellers who snoozed through Realskiers.com’s first triumph in this gilded competition, permit me to bring you up to speed. Then as now, the battle for this cherished trophy (metaphorically speaking – the S-BP lacks sufficient funds for a memento commensurate with its prestige) was fierce, extending both of its eponymous founders to previously unknown limits.
The final ballot was determined by leg wrestling over Stump’s furious protest; he cogently argued that this sort of bias against the vertically challenged has no place in a free society. Bertoni imperiously overruled Stump’s evermore strident complaints, citing a lack of legible documentation, tardy submissions and a tendency to perspire copiously when provoked.
This year’s competition was no less fraught.
