I make the first few turns and I can feel my right leg is uncooperative. My femur is initializing the turns just fine but I can feel the latency on the finish, causing the inside edge of my tip to get caught on whatever sugar snow it can find. The delay in my right ski swinging to the left is annoying and sloppy … and dangerous as I’m hugging the right side line next to the trees. If my ski doesn’t come with me, I could get caught on the wrong side of this little ridgeline and end up eating bark. Not a popular choice. Especially when you are on the one trail underneath the one lift and all the chairs are packed full of people critiquing those below them.
The next few turns I spend trying to pinpoint exactly why my leg has decided not to cooperate with the timing of the rest of my turns by doing a meditative body scan. I start by focusing on my femoral ball in the hip socket — is it moving smoothly and actually rotating through the turn or is it getting caught as it rotates inward? Somewhere along the way I developed femoroacetabular impingement (FAI) where my pelvic bone actually wraps too far around my femoral ball, drastically reducing my range of motion and causing increasing arthritis. So it’s always the first thing I blame.
Next, I focus on the lower femur and the muscles around my repaired knee. Perhaps I overworked those uncooperative muscles yesterday and now they are sloppy? I am always conscious of the movements of my vastus medialis and if it’s pulling my right knee into the center enough. The stupid FAI has been slowly degenerating my whole damn right leg.
I pay attention to the lateral movements of my ankle and the lower leg to see if they are twisting properly and moving in sync with my femur. Have my ankles gotten weak? I’ve spent most of the summer walking on dirt roads and now that I’m on snow, I am starting to wonder if the lack of variable terrain has developed a serious impediment to my skiing and how am I going to quickly make that up over the next few weeks?
Finally, I watch with my inner eye for the movement of my right foot. Has my shin gotten lazy and let my foot point downward into the snow rather than engaging the shin and lifting the ball of my foot? That would be the easiest explanation as to why my tip was getting caught. If my shin isn’t strong enough to lift the tip of my ski, I will end up in the backseat, rocking my center of gravity backward and screwing up just about everything.
By the time I make it to the bottom of the lift, my right hip is feeling quite a bit uncomfortable and I realize that I had missed a left turn compression on one of those mounds of sugar snow you have no choice but to slam into. Instead of letting my body go with the mound and playfully launching over it into the next turn, I compressed my right hip into it so hard that I could feel the arthritis crunching. Nothing that a little painkiller won’t take care of later, but if I don’t resolve the problem quickly I will rip my ACL into pieces when my tip catches the next time.
Latency. Skiing’s silent killer. That little moment of sloppiness, that slight lack of instant communication between one body part and another. If your knee isn’t cooperating simultaneously with your femur, if it’s one second behind in movement — that huge bone will be so far ahead of your knee that — POP! There goes your season. So how can we resolve this issue? What can we do to increase the response time of our body parts so that they are all working somewhat closer together than they were before?
Activation. Work on waking up these body parts and bumping them out of their sloppiness by creating exercises that highten their awareness, making these movements more intrinsic and natural than they were before. The U.S. Paralympic Alpine Team uses activation drills as part of their morning routine, reawakening those body parts that would prefer to sleep their way through training rather than participate. I sneak them in wherever I can — lying in bed, riding the chairlift and waiting in those Saturday morning liftlines. If I’m not skiing, I’m activating. Skiing makes us better people, but only if we actually choose to improve.
Merisa Sherman is a long time Killington resident, Realtor, bartender and KMS Coach. Reach out to her at femaleskibum@gmail.com.
