Thursday, February 18, 2010

Now this is an olympic sport I could do well in

The falling flat on your back and racing downhill against your own ski event.


I remember my very first experience skiing. I was about 15 years old. My uncle owned a ski lodge (long sold), called Pine Knob in Clarkson MI. (my dad worked for the airline, so it was cheaper for me to fly to MI, and ski for free at my uncle's, then it was to go the 5 miles to Buck Hill in Burnsville). I digress.

The first time out there I got a private instructor. As we're getting ready to go down for the first time, he says to follow him and do everything he does. He took off and proceeded to spin in the air and go down backward. You guessed it. The guy said do everything he did, and I took him literally. After the wipeout, he came back up probably wondering what kind of idiot student he had; but, I was a pretty good athlete and caught on fairly quickly after he explained he wanted to be able to watch me come down. That was the only place I had ever skied in my life, up until about 4 years ago when I went with Jonathan on his 4th grade ski outing to Powder Ridge near St. Cloud.

4 comments:

  1. The LMR said it reminded her of falling off the snowmobile at 60mph last Sunday. Ouch.

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  2. Once again, I knew this had to be KD. And I second that - I know one sport I would be great in - riding the luge like crazy until I flew off and hit a pole. I'd be great at that - let me enter the Olympics!

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  3. I don't think she'd want to be reminded of that very often. How far did she travel after the intitial thump? It's okay if she can laugh about it now; but I certainly pray she wasn't banged up too bad.

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  4. Gabrielle: I'm trying to think of any summer olympic sports where death is one of the possible consequences of failure. I know a few people have been speared by javelins in track.

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