On Learning to Ski at 40
How to learn (hard) new skills as an adult
My fiancée is a former D1 skier. I had never skied a day in my life… until this weekend.
Growing up in San Diego, I never gravitated toward winter sports. Other families I knew went skiing or snowboarding in the nearby mountains every year, but for whatever reason, our family never did.
Since I didn’t learn as a kid, later in life I felt intimidated by these sports. I secretly dreaded being invited on a ski or snowboard trip, and would mostly check out whenever the topic came up in conversation, since I had literally nothing to contribute.
I imagine I felt the same way about the snow that adults who never learned to swim feel about the ocean.
I would be lying if I said it wasn’t intimidating, having a partner who is incredibly good at a sport and then trying to join in as an absolute novice. But with Chelsea coming from a whole family of skiers, it was only a matter of time before I was invited on a trip to the mountains. This year, my reckoning with skiing finally came, in the form of a trip to Tahoe.
Chelsea and her family were incredibly understanding, patient, and generous about the whole thing, so it’s not like it was some high-pressure set up for a ski comedy (Better off Dead x Meet the Parents, anyone?). Instead, it was about as chill and supportive a learning opportunity as I could ask for.
If you know me, you know I pride myself on being a lifelong learner. But my comfort zone is learning intellectual things: reading, researching, taking classes. I’ve never been a great athlete. So I saw this weekend as an opportunity to challenge myself by learning a difficult new physical skill, while also having fun with people I love.
Here are five principles I found helpful in the process:
1. Set a Low Bar
Other people might be motivated by ambitious goals, but for me, if I’m feeling anxious about a goal, it’s more helpful to set a low bar at first.
Fortunately, skiing has a helpful color-coded difficulty scale. I told myself I’d be happy if I could just make it down a green run by the end of the weekend. (Later, Chelsea told me this was an absurdly low bar, but I didn’t know any better at the time, so it was helpful for me).
2. Get Expert Instruction
I signed up for a half day adult group lesson, and I’m glad I did… even if it felt cringe at times.
Our group of about eight adults were mostly men like me in their thirties and forties. Several were tech guys from the Bay Area. At least half were there for the same reason I was—their partners and in-laws were experienced skiiers.
Our instructor started at the very beginning, showing us how to snap our boots into and out of our skis. She then had us form a circle and practice scooting around, first on one ski, then on two. I imagine that at this point we looked pretty ridiculous, like overgrown toddlers wobbling around learning brand new gross motor skills.
Like the ski equivalent of preschoolers, we learned the difference between “pizza” (skis pointed in a wedge) and “french fries” (skis parallel), and then we were ready to take the magic carpet up to the bunny slope.
Takeaway: There are group classes and private lessons available for almost any skill you could want to learn. For most skills, there are decades or centuries of established pedagogy for instructors to draw from. There’s no need to re-invent the wheel. You can learn much faster with expert instruction.
3. Give Yourself Permission to Fail (or Fall)
One by one, we took turns plunging down the hillside. I was relieved to make it down the first time without falling, but there were plenty of tumbles in our class. When a classmate I’d befriended kept falling on each run, I told him, “falling is part of learning,” and I meant it as a reminder for myself as much as for him. (The process reminded me of something I heard when I was learning T’ai Chi push hands: “invest in loss.”)
I would get my falls in later, when Chelsea and her family took me up the ski lift to some longer green runs, and finally my first blue.
4. Get Reps
Honestly, the most helpful thing about the class was just going down the bunny slope dozens of times. The feeling of gliding downhill on skis was totally unfamiliar to me, and frankly, it was a little scary at first, because I felt out of control.
Learning to turn, too, was tricky, and despite all the tips people gave me, I just needed to practice it over and over again to get a feel for it. I got more reps in that afternoon and the second day, doing the same green runs over and over to build confidence and muscle memory.
5. Make It Fun (and Meaningful)
Most importantly, as an adult, you need to make learning fun. You will never stick with anything if you don’t enjoy the process, as well as the outcome.
Fortunately, skiing is fun. Once I got the hang of it enough to relax and enjoy gliding down the green runs, to breathe and take in the scenery, I started to understand why people love the sport. And getting to ski with Chelsea and her family made the whole process more enjoyable and more meaningful.
Still, it’s not like every moment of the process was enjoyable. Far from it. As I learned on my first Vipassana retreat, when you pay close enough attention to any experience from moment to moment, some parts of sensory experience are pleasurable, others are unpleasant, and some are neutral.
This was definitely true of my experience of skiing. Moments of enjoyment (the sensation of gliding, the view of the mountains, Chelsea’s smile) alternated with moments of stress (fear when I picked up too much speed, the burning in my calves and hip flexors as I tried futilely to slow my descent, my frustration with falling repeatedly on my first blue run).
In retrospect, it’s interesting to observe my emotional reactions and tendency to grasp onto the pleasurable parts of experience and avoid the stressful ones. I’m curious about how this experience relates to the embrace of challenging experiences I wrote about in Full Metal Spirituality and to the Vajrayana Buddhist practices I’m exploring. That’s all part of my internal process of making meaning from the experience and relating it to my values.
As you’ve probably gathered, I not only succeeded in my low-bar goal of going down green runs, but got my first blue as well (I’m told there’s some kind of pin you get for this). But more importantly, I challenged myself and had a fun, meaningful experience in the process. I’m curious to see how this experience unfolds the next time I get a chance to go skiing. And I’m grateful to Chelsea and her family for presenting me with this opportunity.
That’s all for this week! As always, I appreciate your feedback on Mind, Meaning, and Magic. What was your favorite principle I shared this week? What would you like to learn more about? Have you learned a difficult skill as an adult? If so, how did you go about it? Let me know in the comments.
Thanks for reading,
Chris Cordry, LMFT
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It is amazing what love can make us do in this world.