Why do you like skiing/snowboarding so much?

A snowHead

What is it about skiing (or riding a snowboard) that you like so much?

Why is it so much fun for you?

What's the best thing about it?

Can you put it in words, or is it too difficult to verbalise?

Is there anything else that comes close?

Opinions please. Very Happy

A snowHead

In the mountains
Fresh Air
A physical and mental challenge
Getting away in winter to do something invigorating
Rewinding the old clock spring
Something to keep fit for!
Speed
Companionship
Great crack
Good food
The views
Break from reality!
Time to myself
Bit of anorakism's as well.

All these and more

Well, the person's real but it's just a made up name, see?

It's one of the most therapeutic things I know because if you don't clear your head and concentrate, you fall over - and the consequence of clearing your head and concentrating is that you totally forget about work and those other petty annoyances of RL Smile

Plus it's physical exercise, it's getting out and about in the mountains, it's the peace and quiet away from traffic noise...

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stevew, a great post which sums up my feelings too. snowHead

Anyway, snowHeads is much more fun if you do.

I only ski as provides me with the justification to post on snowHeads. Can't stand it otherwise.

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stevew, very well put. Me too.

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For me it's a bit of a Zen thing. I'm letting my body do what it should whilst emptying my mind of conscious thoughts. Couple this with being in a mountain environment and I find it both relaxing and exhilarating simultaneously.

After all it is free

Soft snow
getting a turn right
going a bit quicker than last time (and living)
feeling knackered after a great day
relaxing over a great meal
Genepi!

Not necessarily in that order.

stevew, you reading my mind Very Happy

that about sums it up for me. It's the total experience as well the sliding down the slopes.

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Kramer, 'cos, good or bad it's as much fun as sex and half as painful

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Masque, boy you been doin' it wrong Shocked

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The sheer beauty of the mountains, the thrill of skiing/boarding, physical exertion and the only place I can really switch off from the pressure of life in Uk - work etc

Spectacular scenery - I find it very calming just looking at the mountains.

I would echo eng_ch, as it relly makes everything else leave your mind. I have suffered from headaches due to teeth clenching for many years and skiing is the most effective pain killer I have tried. After the first day on the slopes my head is completely clear.

You know it makes sense.

Agree with everything so far, but I've just thought of another one: the ability to eat and drink voraciously and burn off the calories and the hangover with little or no apparent effort.

Otherwise you'll just go on seeing the one name:

I just feel at home in the mountains, plus I loved skidding around on snow as a kid

A snowHead

All the things others have said - but for me "balance" is the essence of it all.

brian

Adrenaline and endorphins, an addictive combination.

Well, the person's real but it's just a made up name, see?

Beauty of the Mountains
The 'Silence of Snow'
Increased Light (compared to grey London)
The different sensations of 'Dancing' Down a Slope
Challenges and the satisfaction of overcoming them
Good mountain food in beautiful loactions
You cannot be thinking about work when standing at the top of a mogulled black!

brian

agavin, on the other hand, I for one spend plenty of time thinking about mogulled blacks when sitting at work !

Anyway, snowHeads is much more fun if you do.

brian,

exactly what we are doing at the moment ... inhabiting a fantasy cyber ski resort that reminds us of being out there ... Cool

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I like skiing because it brings me into contact with human beings. If they didn't ski they'd probably come nowhere near me.

Look at this photo:

Click here to enlarge. It not only shows the way skis bring people into close contact with wildlife, it shows just how much they enjoy turning skis to negotiate what's ahead of them.

No one seems to make skis long enough for me, but I'd settle for a board.

After all it is free

There was a great article I read during the winter olympics that said most wintersports were about the small child in you being able to go "Wheeeee!" like your first slide on ice or a polished wood floor. Sounds perfect to me Gravity - Friction = Wheeee

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fatbob, I like that analogy! Toofy Grin

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Having weekend skiing for five months a year. It's like having two summers.

What everyone else has said. The adrenaline, the peace, the beauty, the utter gorgeousness of it all snowHead

Kramer asked if there was anything else that came close. Yes, sailing.

You know it makes sense.

All the stuff that Stevew mentioned too, but after my first trip (Not so long ago) one of the main things I commented on was that it was the holiday where I'd thought about work/home/normal stuff less than any other trip I'd been on - Seems to be a common theme.
Lying on that beach it's too easy to drift back to reality (Although give me the beach in the summer too!)

Otherwise you'll just go on seeing the one name:

A snowHead

I do like to sail as well but not done it in over 10years, gives me an idea if I have any holidays left for the summer Smile

A snowHead

Skiing for all the same reasons, sailing for all then same reasons, Freedom is the word that springs to mind Very Happy

Well, the person's real but it's just a made up name, see?

The mountains, the air, the occasion, but most of all, when it all comes together, the feeling I get, so akin to flying, of near effortless swooping curves, a harmony of riding the skis, gravity driven with only gentle weight shifts to make. snowHead

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I was thinking about this last season and here is something I wrote (it may need a little more revision).

Leaning out.

When you ski a steep slope you must lean out. You have to re-educate your fear. Only practice does this.
Why lean out? I could show you easily if you were here. Stand sideways on an imaginary slope.
Lean strongly out: Your hips tip in to balance you. Notice how your weight is on the uphill edges of your feet? Your skis are automatically on their sharp edges, digging into slope. Lean fearfully in and your skis flatten to the slope: you slide and fall.

When you ski, you balance on your edges, facing out.

I was about four when I first put on skis, or rather, when I stood on one ski and my father (was it my father? That's how I imagine it ) pushed down the lever on the cable binding; and then, precariously, I stood on the other, my mother perhaps holding me, as it, too, was done up.
Was it like that? Or was I lifted on?
There is nobody now who remembers.

After a few minutes sliding on the flat, my mother tells me, I said “Pooh will walk now”.
Or that’s what I remember her telling me years ago. She is vaguer about it now, though still eager to recount it, and I to correct her.

I was never good at sport, I was a quiet, solitary child. But after a while, that one week a year my parents took me skiing became my one true access to pleasure through the activity of my body in the world. I often dreamed about it .

Is elation an instinctive human reaction to mountains: the sense of awe at an enormous otherness: a sort of primeval metaphor of the spirit? Or is it only now, when some of us feel safe on the earth and death seems foreign?

I balance on the imaginary slope, above a gulf. The stance must prepare you for anything.

Turn your shoulders: your upper body must face down the slope. Top foot a little forward.

Now you are ready to turn. But to turn the ski must be on its other edge.

A ski is narrower in the middle than at its ends. If it is tilted on its edge (can you picture it?) to make the middle touch the snow - under your weight and the force of the turn - the ski must bend in an arc. .
And sliding on that arc you turn.

But first you must do the difficult thing, you must turn down the slope and and begin to fall: let gravity take you and not lean back.

The front of the ski does most of the steering. If your weight goes back on your heels you will lose control and fall. I can tell you, but it won’t help: if you learn to ski it will happen often, and still at moments of self doubt.

You must balance on your feet like a dancer, the balance point of the ski under the balls of your feet: your upper body still, as the rest of your body twists and flexes from side to side.

And gradually the body absorbs it, all the constant, necessary shifts of weight and stance; till finally you simply ski, as, rising from a chair you simply walk ; though walking never seized the whole of your being like this, fixing you in the passing moment , the exact pull and texture of the earth as you pass over it, balancing on the edge of your possible. (Or was learning to walk a little like this?)

And what you are seeking, what it ends up being For, even if only sensed as a possibility rather than reached, is those moments when it all becomes effortless: when you forget the clumsy boots and cumbersome skis, forget even your separateness from the earth, and you fall in perfect balance.

Moments you could say, of ordinary transcendence.

And those moments you will remember in your bones and sinews for the rest of your life, and dream of and want to return to.

Not for nothing, when we see skill escape the struggle that made it, fitting its moment perfectly, in boxer or musician, do we speak of grace.

There are other ways to find something like it: in the depths of love, for example. But you can’t book that at Inghams.

For perhaps seventeen or eighteen years after my childhood I didn’t ski. The accidents of life happened, and part of me forgot. Then, twenty one years ago, a recurring dream brought me back to the snows .

I didn’t dream of skiing but of going to ski: and always when I arrived the snow melted or my skis disappeared or the lift broke. And when I woke, each time the disappointment was a little harder to shake off, as my bones remembered, gradually, my childhood dreams.

Since then I have skied every year: skiing more and more off piste, seeking the untouched places, the steeper slopes; accepting the small, accumulating bet on the stability of snow layers. The occasional heightened moments when to fall might be to die. Living in the moment. Not a pure “now” which would obliterate me, but a place where time becomes physical, expanding and contracting with my awareness of the landscape.

And within it there is a clarification or perhaps merely a simplification of the self.

Skiing a slope, the future becomes a narrow space, corresponding almost exactly with the physical space below me. My body following the line of my gaze as I thread between trees (fatal to look at them; you must look at the space between, where smoothly you will be and are). And the past is all my past selves looking out from behind my eyes, and nothing else.

Time, the abstract dimension of regrets and fears and plans, is where we live in exile, outside these privileged moments of Now. And if this Now is a kind of timelessness, it can also be experienced in other ways, for example in art , which rather than narrowing time collapses the past and future into the Now.

The Time of the glacier is not our time, but sometimes we touch its coldness.

And places where where you have loved your life, themselves become loved: would be loved even if they weren’t so beautiful.

And on each huge flank how intimately the skier knows, or imagines with his body, each fold or furrow, the pleasure of carving the first track in untouched snow.
Even the ugly excrescences of ski lifts acquire a guilty allure, drawing the eye upwards.
And in absence the poor sap pores over piste maps and extreme ski videos: the pornography of his passion.

And now as I cycle in the evenings laboriously up Highgate hill to be fit, I count the weeks and hours.

Soon I will be there again: I will be exiting a cable car on a mountaintop, the landscape and sky opening into hugeness. The dusty old earth starting afresh, a virgin again under new snow. The cloud, perhaps, below us, filling the valley bottoms with soft inlets and bays of white.

We leave the crowd and walk to an edge, we step into our skis.

Below me is a white gulf where I must balance - a tilted page -
Already my eyes are tracing the promise of faint swells and hollows.
I push off and the wind greets my face.

I feel the exact give of the snow -

I lean out , I welcome life.

Anyway, snowHeads is much more fun if you do.

"Heavy................."

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snowball, A lovely bit of writing.

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Sorry, I just discovered the text went in twice - I've taken out the repeat now.

After all it is free

Skiing is the only holiday I know where a week can seem like two weeks.

Only problem is that it still goes too quickly!

I love the exhilaration that comes from throwing yourself down a mountain and I love the challenge.

I skiied for the first time this year and I just wish I had done it 15 years ago - have a lot of time to make up for now!!

When boarding i simply feel alive.

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The tan-lines

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Why do you like skiing/snowboarding so much?

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