It's embarrassing to admit that I hardly skied or snowboarded the last couple of seasons. However, what is even more embarrassing is how poor my snow sport skills have become. In the past, I have snow boarded, downhill skied, telemark skied, cross country skied and skated (special cross country skis). I have invested a lot of money in the equipment to do all of this and because I tried to do all of it I never became really good at any particular snow sport. Because of wrestling, I have only skied a handful of times in the last decade, and only telemark skied once or twice in the last decade.
This past fall I went to the local ski swap and bought myself some new telemark skis for the upcoming season. Yesterday I skipped work and went to White Pass with my son-in-law Nick Jordan (who is an amazing snow boarder) and my nephew Peter Hibbard (who is a very good snow boarder). I arrived at our local resort, White Pass, fully expecting to be absolutely amazing on my new telemark skis. I felt so old and stiff that I literally needed help from Nick initially strapping on my new skis. Yeah, it was pretty embarrassing. Wow! Having not skied on telemark skis for a number of year now, I was shocked at how my thighs burned after only 2 runs. Needless to say, despite having some really nice telemark equipment, I mostly just paralleled skied. The lunges required for a telemark turn just wasn't going to happen.
For the last several runs, I decided to snow board instead of ski. Several years ago, I bought a world class snow board so remarkable that it came with a name--"The World Wide Weapon." I progressed so rapidly on this board that I demanded that my children refer to me as the "The World Wide Weapon." Now I am not going to comment on my actual boarding skills after such a long lay off, but if you happen to be skiing at White Pass this season and see some geriatric doing X Game like moves, please kindly address ME as "The World Wide Weapon." The bruises on my body prove that I've earned it!
Above is a picture of the triumphant return of the WWW on the WWW!
1 comment:
I believe a number of people would refer to me as the World Wide Weapon as well, but more so because I tend to go much faster than my skill level allows which results in me not being able to quite turn as well as required.
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