My skiing experience in Japan started badly well before I even started skiing.

Sometime after I arrived in Nou-machi, it was pointed out that the town would be getting a small ski resort and I mentioned that I’d been skiing a few times and liked skiing although I wasn’t very good.

Keep in mind that although I grew up on the Western slope of Colorado, I only went skiing twice in nine years. In fact, I’d been cross-country skiing more (as that was taught in junior high and high school) than downhill skiing and I’d skied more in Colorado after I moved back to Kansas than I had when I lived in Colorado. I also, at the time, hadn’t been skiing since, maybe, the early George H. W. Bush administration.

The office staff apparently took my “No, really, I suck at skiing” as false modesty and acquired for me (although I paid for it) a set of very long racing skis that were way beyond anything I’d ever tried to ski with before (200 centimeters if you’re curious). I decided to go for it and use those skis. After all, once you’ve learned to ski, going skiing again is just like falling off a bicycle. (Or something like that.)

For our first outing, I joined the office staff for an annual excursion to Nagano Prefecture where construction was well underway for the 1998 Olympics. As I suited up and got my airplane wings attached to my feet, I was surprised that I was expected to join a rigorous warm up of stretches and calisthenics. I joined but was tired by the end of it. After that, I got on the lift with one of my bosses and one of the women in the city office. I noticed the chair was lower than I was used to when I sat down with a large smack that shook the entire lift.

Then, at the top, I got ready to stand up and, well, things fell apart. In the USA, at least in Colorado, you stand up a the top of a ramp. This helps you stand up and helps get you away from the lift if anything goes awry. In Japan the stand up line is on a flat section and you’re expected to stand up and skate ahead of the chair. I went to stand up and things went awry. The low lift chair had me in a funny position. The knee I injured whilst acting rebelled and I couldn’t stand up. I ended up on my side in soft snow which made it difficult for me to get up.

For reasons I still don’t understand, although a perverted notion of “saving my face” may have been involved (helping me would have been insulting to me) no one helped me get up. Finally after five minutes of struggle, free lessons in “colorful” English, damning the Japanese to Hell and beyond and having one asshole ski over my pole and bend it slightly, I managed to stand up.

That’s when the lessons began. The Japanese tend to prefer a skiing style that involves moving your uphill foot into parallel as you complete a turn. For me this was mostly a way to confuse me and make me catch my up hill foot on something and cause me to fall down.

Every time I tried to get even a crappy snow plow going just to get my “ski legs” back under me, I had a boss telling me “You suck”. Now, if you’ve followed this blog for a while, you know that I soon tire of being the center of attention, especially if I feel I’m holding a large group back. I kept telling everyone to just go off and ski and leave me to find a place where I could get a ramen and a beer. Er, I mean “leave me to practice by myself.”

Eventually I’d get my “ski legs” back and would start skiing a lot more and actually get pretty good. Then I’d sprain my knee. But that’s another post.