Out with the old blogs - in with the new

I've cleared out all of my old blogs and am starting from scratch with this blog (which means "attack of skiing fever" in case you can't figure it out based on cognates).

The reason: I'm back on skis for the first time in years. This weekend I went up to Manning Park Canada on a Skibuddies trip, and although I only did a bit of nordic skiing and snowshoeing, I'm already hooked again (Seattle's LGBT wintersports club). So I went out today and bought a telemark outfit (K2 World Piste, Black Diamond O1 active touring bindings, and Scarpa T2X boots), and I'm starting this blog.

On the way up to Manning park, we were eating at Subway and I told one of the guys I was with that I would likely only ski through February because I had to get back on the bike. But By the end of the weekend I realized that I would likely ski through the spring, and maybe through June if there was snow worth skiing up in the mountains somewhere. So since I will probably be doing little not related to skiing between now and May, I might as well just stick to a skiing blog.

All weekend long I explained to people that it had been 9 years since I had been on skis, but when I got back I did some thinking and mapped out my timeline to when I did my last skiing. It was in 1993, so it's been more like 15 years. It's long enough that I remember few details of any of my skiing. I do remember that I stopped when I entered graduate school because I simply could not afford it anymore.

I do remember that the last season I skied I had decided to take up telemarking next. I don't know why exactly, probably just because I was tired of doing the same old thing over and over again and was looking for something different. So now that I've decided to start skiing again I figured I might as well start where I left off and take up telemarking next.

I have no idea whether telemark skiing will live up to my obviously naive expectations, so I'm laying them out here as a point of reference later in the season to see how expctations and reality compare. I'm hoping that the free heel will allow for a bit more room for adapting turns to terrain and conditions. I always felt like paralell turning mas modulated only by degree. In steeper stuff turns would become a bit more stem-ish through the fall line, but beyond that there wasn't much variety. That might have been a result of my own limitations though. Downhill on free heel skis seems to give a much wider range of options because you can also modulate the effective turning radius of the skis, have some control of your center of gravity independent of edge pressure, and the ability to shift back and forth between more or less parralell turns and telemark turns. What I'm hoping to find from all of this is that telemarking is an ongoing learning experience where you figure out the best combinations of all fo the above for skiing down a particular line in particular conditions.

In short I'm hoping that telemark is to alpine skiing as violin playing is to piano playing. Obviously both the piano and the violin require developping technique, but the range of technique on the piano is smaller. It's a matter of applying a few basic principles in increasingly complex ways. The piano is basically two dimensional, with only a small amount of projection into a third dimension. On the violin every interval, every bit of passagework (movement between basic hand positions), every new style of attack requires developping new technique. It's an instrument of a dizzying amount of technical detail. You have two hands moving in three dimensions. It requires more precision and the precision is harder to come by because of the inherent lack of conatraint (no frets, and a bow that can cross the strings at any arbitrary angle). But in the long run (at least for me) learning the violin is satisfying in a way that learning the piano can't match. You feel yourself adapting to the instrument in very subtle ways. It grows on you. I'm hoping that telemark skiing works something like this, where your neuro-muscular system gradually grows into the skis, developping the myriad detailed bits of modulating the skis degrees of freedom much like you develop the myriad detailed bits of modulating bow and fingerwork in passagework.

We'll see. For now I just can't wait to get the skis back from the shop and head out to the slopes, which is why I'm doing the next best thing - writing about it.

One final bit: this is my first season skiing after all of my work in 20th century French philosophy. We'll have to see if any Merleau-Ponty rings true as I work on skiing this season. It's also my first ski season after taking up yoga and working through Buddhist philosophy, so all of that baggage is there to mull over too. At least I have something to think about on those long slogs up the mountain.