Ski Racing as Character Building

Last weekend I went skiing for the first time in four years. I feel as though I’ve broken a drought or something! Let me go back…At age twelve I started to ski, mainly out of boredom. It was like this, my friends had all started skiing the year before and I had just gotten through a winter in Labrador City without buddies on Saturdays and Sundays. The prospect of another dull, long winter was not appealing and so I convinced my parents to let me start skiing. My mother was mortified. She was concerned that I would break my legs. After all, that’s what skiers did right? I insisted and whined and kept on and kept on until finally, that Christmas Day I had new ski equipment. I’m pretty sure that the prospect of another dull, long winter with me moping around the house may have weighed in on mother’s final approval. Anyway, that was that and I took to the hills so to speak.

I ended up really enjoying myself a lot. It was an activity I took to with something akin to love and to this day, no sporting activity I’ve taken part in comes close to the thrill I get from downhill skiing. The sound of wind whistling past my ears and the scraping of edges as I accelerate down a slope is like a drug. The physical workout is intense as I am not a ‘soft’ skier. I like to push and get the exercise. At the end of a run I like the burn in my thighs and the feeling that a racehorse must feel as it sucks air deep into its lungs! Exhilarated!

That first winter was one of following my buddies into danger. The deal went something like this “If you can keep up with us you can ski with us…we can’t always be waiting around”. I learned fast and came to like speed. Before long I was shushing along with the best of them, only perhaps with less skill and grace.

The following year I entered the Nancy Greene racing program and managed to compete relatively well. At least well enough to earn me a berth on the tryouts for the Smokey Mountain Ski Club Racing team. Following a lot of training and work I made the team and proceeded down a path that kept me engaged for many years. It also helped to ensure that I made some lifelong friends, whom I still stay in contact with when I can. Whenever I pass through a town that some of the old racing team are in I manage to make a connection if only briefly.

What made that particular group a special group I wonder? Well, to start with we had a fantastic coach in the person of Rene Beauchamps. Rene was a Frenchman from France, not Quebec. He was no nonsense and seemed very strict at first. Once he got to know that you were playing by the rules and pulling your weight, and doing the work, he lightened up. If you did well he let you know. If you did poorly he let you know, in no uncertain terms! He would be there in training with us, working out and not slacking off. We worked like dogs! All the while Rene would be puffing on DuMaurier cigarettes like a chimney. I don’t know where he got the wind!

But the main thing was that Rene knew ski racing. He trained us to be competitors, not just skiers. Some of the team members progressed to the point where they were racing as far afoot as Europe! I never rose to that height but I am quite happy with where I had progressed. To this day I am quite comfortable on any ski slope I have ever been on, fully confident that my training has prepared me for the decent.

We were a good blend of people, guys and girls on the team ranging in ages from 10 years to around 18 years. We trained three nights a week and both days on the weekend and it was a stipulation of being a team member that our grades had to be up to scratch as well. Rene had full cooperation from the schools. To earn our keep at Smokey Mountain, the racing team had to do maintenance work along side the paid employees of the mountain. We positioned snow fences, combed the hills, assisted in grooming, iced ramps and generally did whatever was required of us…anything that Rene instructed us to do to earn our positions on the mountain.

That period of my life on Smokey Mountain was one of emotional and physical change. I was a teenager and finding my place in the world. I realized as a racer that I wasn’t a team sport player, not to say that I’m not a team player (because I am) but not into team sports. My preferences are the individual sports, ski racing, tennis, those sort of sports. The ones where if you do well, its because you have worked hard and succeeded, and if you do poorly, you know who to blame…yourself. By those standards I have been able to take any action I’ve needed to change things I’ve done wrong. I credit the racing years for that part of my nature. That’s not to say that I didn’t have that kind of nature already. On the contrary I think is it because I am that kind of person that racing appealed to me in the first place. When I was a kid if I had a question or a problem, my family, parents and relatives, would encourage me and my cousins to solve it ourselves, do the research, find the answer, and follow through. If we were having problems but were working on them we would get help. But at the root was always ‘do it yourself’. That has worked for me my whole life. It has made me confident and outgoing. I will try to succeed at any task I undertake and I look forward to trying things I have not done.

What’s next I wonder?