Mermer blakeslee skiing games
Same Blood
Houghton Mifflin
1989
Ballantine Books
February, 1990
Part One,
Chapter 1
Page 15
Synopsis
Reviews
they always go places together, though sometimes they pull apart till I yell “OW!” and then Bubby stops the pullin’ but not the game and one boob kisses the other.
III
Daddy, things’ve gone bad. Today you woulda been ashamed and proud of me all in one. I quit on Mrs. Butler. I didn’t just clean for her. I done other stuff, too. Like today, I mowed her lawn, cleaned out the pachysandra, loaded up the rhododendron with cocoa mulch, whatever she says. She trained me from the ground up though she still watched, so even more than everything she likes done, I know how she likes it done, too. You gotta brush the ottomans off one direction first, then the other. Otherwise they’ll be ruined, and the word “ruined” comes outa her mouth like all of England’s stuffed in them stools.
Sometimes when I just come in, first off, Mrs. Butler’s head looks real little settin’ back against them big red flowers on the slipcover. And she’s readin’ her list and complainin’. Like yesterday, Mary Reilly hemmed Mrs. Butler’s curtains up from the bottom and not the top like she’s supposed to. Mrs. Butler was up all night. Now I do my best to think just like her to make me work better, so I could just about feel the shame in them curtains, but then goin’ home I have to shake out like a dog does water ’fore I drive myself loony. And I see when Mrs. Butler’s friends come, she switches. She’s so polite then, you wanna dump compost right over her head, or do sump’n even more drastic that would make her heart stop, and she’d need you like she needed a doctor, or sump’n she couldn’t pay for. Why with her friends she talks so nice, settin’ there on her couch, she
53’s Journey
It was cool, took a lesson and then skied another couple of hours. The chair lift was a bit slow, so used the Poma lift after the first time. It was a bit different, but once I got the hang of it not a problem. The snow was good, rental skis were some type of Rossi ski, but they were good enough. I brought my own boots, helmet, pants and gloves as I did not want to use the “rental clothes” except for the jacket. It was an amazingly efficient operation, and not overly crowded. There was a wide variety of skier abilities on the hill. There is a cafe “mid-mountain” and the slope splits there, “Expert Only” to the right, and everyone else is supposed to go left. The left was ok, but had a couple of flattish pitches that sometimes I struggled to maintain speed before the next drop off. I liked the expert only side, but the speed was faster due to the steeper pitch and afforded me less time to work on my turns.
I did not feel like I skied very well today, but did have some good runs at times. I seemed to lack the rhythm I had when we were at Deer Valley. Had one near fall, but for the most part I was in balance.
The lesson concentrated on getting my skis more parallel.... Imagine that right? Did lots of drills, and worked on lifting my inside ski during turns. I think you might have gotten a piece paper under the inside ski a few times. I really feel that I have the ability to unweight the new inside ski when I am traveling faster. I was following the instructor down and he was going pretty slow demonstrating the lifting of the inside ski. Definitely a drill I need to work on a lot. As is typically the case, when I make a mistake it seems my feet get too far apart and then things get defensive until I can make a few turns to get back in balance. Making turns really does get me back in the flow when I get the wide base going. I just hate it when I do it.
Note: Ski Apps do not work indoors
Head Games
And BTW, I melt down pretty easily on any double-black!
I remember a beautiful morning at Killington, new snow, hardly any crowds. I was skiing with a small group of friends. Conditions were perfect and I was stoked. (What I didn't realize was how tired I was from skiing the day before).
I charged down a groomed black, carving turns at high speed, and suddenly caught an edge. I fell and slid down the rest of the hill backwards at a pretty good clip. THAT didn't scare me; I was laughing. But when I got up to put my skis back on, my head was KILLING me. I must have whacked it pretty hard. And, all of a sudden, the smile left my face and I started to cry.
Used to shaking things off, I skied to the intersection of another run where my friends were heading down. It was a blue, bumped up really nice from the last night's heavy snowfall. It was a run that normally I would have thought fun, even if I couldn't ski it pretty. But I was terrified. My skis wouldn't turn. I had to bail out and ski down an easy blue with my DH, down to the base lodge. I was done for the day.
So, yes, it's happened. And it's like the fear takes over, and even though you know what you need to do, your mind will simply not control your body the way it's supposed to. Even though I did hurt my head in that fall, most of my inability to ski afterwards was mental, not physical.
A conversation about fear with Mermer Blakeslee.
For many of us, skiing is a head game. Get past the fear, and suddenly things become a lot easier. So who better to talk to about this than Mermer Blakeslee, the ski industry’s recognized fear expert and author of In the Yikes! Zone: A Conversation With Fear (Dutton, 2002).
Mermer started skiing at the age of 3. After training at Burke Mountain Academy in Vermont, she competed internationally. For the past 20 years, she’s trained instructors as an examiner for Professional Ski Instructors of America (PSIA). In 1996, she became a member of PSIA’s elite National Demonstration Team and now serves as a selector for that team. Mermer travels all over the country educating industry professionals. She also leads women’s seminars at Wyndham, NY, and Snowbird, Utah.
SD: Mermer, I know you’re also the author of two novels [In Dark Water and Same Blood], yet you do all this work with skiing and fear. How do you reconcile the two?
MB: I know they seem diametrically opposed, but both of these disciplines come together in the core of my being. A lot of what I’ve done with fear and skiing is also what I’ll do with fear and writing. When you have a writing block, it’s because your expectations are high. You need an entrance ramp to get into either writing or skiing. You can’t just click in and be in the zone. It’s like when you come into music. You can’t just start dancing unselfconsciously. You may start out on the sidelines watching, then you may start moving a bit, then you slowly get drawn in. You have to find your process to actualize what you’re capable of doing.
One big difference between me and sports psychologists is that I treat the athlete as an artist. The psychologists deal with conditioned responses and overlook the creativity of the sport. I talk about skiing as a metaphor for any creative act. There’s always that moment where you have to give yo