LOSS OF NERVE
LACK OF CONFIDENCE
FALLING
BAD EQUIPMENT

You will only be able to overcome your limitations and other negative influences if you are fully aware of them, and are prepared to take the right action. This may seem quite obvious, but do you know what if anything (besides your technical ability) is holding back your progress? Fear, of course, comes immediately to mind, and maybe even badly fitting ski boots, but suppose I say 'ski school', or even 'holiday', would you be surprised?

Many of these negative influences become positive ones if you can sort them out and work on them, and you will find that there is interaction between many of them.

‘I have been seriously afraid at times but I have used my fear as a stimulating factor rather than allowing it to paralyse me’ Sir Edmund Hillary - ‘View from the Summit’ 1999

I have not cobbled together this title for its alliterative quality, but rather to demonstrate that these three elements are all interlinked, and that their negative aspects are the three most important influences to affect better skiing. If you can sort them out and act on them, you will have just about cracked it. Is it really that easy to attain nirvana and enlightenment?

Fear is the most common handicap against better skiing. After thirty years of teaching skiing I have not found an easy solution, and I don't believe there is one.

Do not confuse fear with nervous excitement. Nervous excitement produces adrenaline and the will to go. Once you are going, you become relaxed and businesslike, and everything is ticketyboo. Fear in its worst form is a state of mental and physical paralysis, an inability to budge, the muscles in a contracted state of immobility, as you agonise over the mogul field ahead, or the cat, or the milk bill, etc. Now if you go sliding off down the piste in this state, the things that you hope won't happen almost certainly will.

How are you going to resolve this predicament?

Let's start by dividing fear into two separate states. Decide first of all whether it is due to lack of confidence, or loss of nerve. These are rather nebulous phrases to describe similar emotions. You may be able to do something about lack of confidence, but loss of nerve can be irreversible.

Quite often people who have mastered a particular sport eventually lose their nerve. They realise that they can no longer cope with the mental and physical pressures, and will often make the right decision to hang up their boots, or put away their fishing rod. Those who continue often subject themselves to a life of misery, and a ski holiday is not supposed to be like that!

There are also people who try to ski with pathological afflictions like vertigo and agoraphobia. (I truly have had people with these phobias to teach!) For them I have never been able to offer suitable advice. These problems should be confronted by somebody more qualified than myself

There are also many people who have lost their nerve for other reasons. Having children can often lower women's fear thresholds to the extent that although they are prepared to enjoy easy skiing, they have no more interest in anything that is physically challenging (and I don’t include raising children).

There are others who have perhaps had a bad fall or even a car accident, and the physical damage and pain, even after recovery, may have affected them psychologically as well. Loss of nerve through accident and injury can be reversed to some extent, and as long as a skier can accept his psychological limitations, he can still enjoy pottering down the easy slopes. Often after a really bad accident a skier will return to do even better, this being especially true with racers, and has a lot to do with pain thresholds, fitness, and other things that I discuss later.

Perhaps I should say a quick word about cross country skiing here as many people have found it a more acceptable form of skiing for their make up. It has many of the attractions of downhill skiing without the hassles. Practically every alpine resort has paths laid out through the woods and round the lakes. You can actually say 'Good Morning' to people, and stop and talk about absolutely nothing to complete strangers if you want. It can be a very gentle, friendly form of exercise, and quite therapeutic, and it takes very little time to learn. Most ski schools have instructors who are well qualified, and quite often after a hard working season of teaching, I have gone cross country skiing to wind down, and to welcome the Spring.

For any cross country skiers reading this who object to my remarks about it being a gentle form of exercise just let me repeat that it can be gentle. At competitive level I would put it on a par with rowing in an eight. It is hell while you’re doing it and wonderful when it’s over.

If there is not much we can do about loss of nerve, there is lots to do about lack of confidence. Sometimes lack of confidence leads to a loss of nerve, but this should be avoided at all costs! Do you physically feel on some days that you cannot go down a particular slope, but that on other days you can? Nevertheless, off you go in the hope that something may come together. The skis are flapping around a lot, you are sitting back, and the weather looks bleak. You may even have a bit of a hangover after that amazing party last night, and you have finished all the Resolve. Suddenly you hit some ice or a bump, and omygod! The minimal amount of confidence or 'go' that you had earlier completely disintegrates. It is a physical state rather than a mental one, and can be quite often the result of tiredness, or any other biological malfunction. Whatever the reason, your physical state affects you mentally to the extent that you develop a feeling of inadequacy. You have two choices; you can either pack up and go home for the day, which is the sensible decision, or else you can blunder on until you frighten yourself and possibly lose your nerve.

Never despair if you find you cannot ski on some days. Stop and give up. I know you are only out on a six day break, but even the best skiers have their off days. They usually pack up and go home to read a good book. Whatever you choose to do, don't struggle on in the hope that you may recover. You may recover, but more often than not you won't, and you could easily do the sort of confidence-losing damage we are trying to avoid. In short, be aware of your limitations.

It is a tricky one to draw the line between where a fall stops being a fall, and becomes a crash. By the time you start thinking about how to react in a crash, you are actually airborne. You can do something, however, and that is relax as you go. When I say relax, I really mean Reeeelax with a capital R. This also applies to lesser falls as well of course. If you Reeeelax, it is surprising how little damage you will do even after the most spectacular wipe out.

You must forget the 'How-did-you-do-today?-Wow-I-didn't-fall-once' syndrome. If you are going to become a better skier by pushing yourself, you can't avoid falling. You don't reckon Alberto Tomba or Franz Klammer got where they did without a few crashes do you? Anyway, you are reading the words of the world's greatest authority on crashes, and I'm still alive. (See Ch1A-Release Bindings)

There is something else to remember about falling which may help you to reduce fear. Within reason you will find that the steeper a slope goes, the less you will hurt yourself as you hit the ground. I'm not suggesting that you should experiment by taking the Devil’s Couloir straight, but normally the falls that hurt the most are the ones on the flat. This has to do with relative mass and gravity. You will slide a lot on a steep slope, and gradually come to a stop, whereas on a flat path, for example, you will go Splat, and be all of a jumble on the deck.

Now it follows that if you are going to fall a lot, you are also going to injure yourself a few times. Injuries can be anything from a sprained thumb to a broken neck, with pulled knee ligaments (being the most common) somewhere in between. It may surprise you that a survey of ski accidents, made by a French medical insurance company, showed that under 7% of reported injuries in the French Alps during the season were broken legs, and that only 0.3% of all skiers sustained a reported injury. So when people say that they are afraid of skiing in case they break a leg, we can see that their chances of doing so are about 5000 to 1 against. These figures assume, of course, that you don't try to break your leg, or other equally important bits, by cranking up your bindings as tight as they will go, leaping off a cliff that turns out to be higher than you expected, or running headlong into a ski lift pylon. These can make for entertaining skiing, but they severely increase the chances of injury.

We can deduce, therefore, that serious injuries are few and far between, but you must accept that skiing is a contact sport. Hopefully, unlike the various games of football, most of the contact will be with the ground, but it can be rough and tough; if you have been brought up on these sort of games you will understand and accept that injury is inevitable, and must be acceptable in skiing. It is quite difficult to accept this fact with the apparent paradox that skiing is a sort of gentle relaxation therapy. Any hard physical exercise tends to be mentally relaxing, but contact sports were never intended to be soft on the body. Alpine skiing was invented in the nineteen twenties by sturdy university students flogging themselves up and down three thousand vertical metres of mountain a day through deep snow. They didn't particularly mind about hurting themselves, and they must have been remarkably fit, but they were, remember, the first holiday skiers.

Fitness plays a crucial part. It not only enables you to ski properly, but also prevents injury and reduces fear. If you are fit, your muscles and your mind will react faster, your ligaments and joints will be more supple, and you will feel good. If you are unfit, you are starting out with a ball and chain round your neck and your head in a paper bag. You won't be able to do the job properly, and may very soon start to lose confidence and feel frightened. I have discussed fitness as a positive aspect earlier, but I really believe that unfitness is one of the main causes of fear, so if you want to be a better skier, dust off the old trainers and get going. Getting fit involves a certain amount of pain, and you begin to realise that your body is capable of going through contortions that you didn't think possible. When you get on skis, your body will be able to cope with the wrenching and battering that much more easily. If you can get your pre-skiing exercises right, it is quite possible to ski all of the first day without any ill effects at all, but as with most things in this cruel world of ours, you must put in a lot of effort beforehand.

'A bad workman always blames his tools' goes the saying, but I have always found that a bad workman, cack-handed though he may be, doesn't really know whether his tools are up to the job or not. Quite often the tools are making him do a bad job in the first place, rather than the other way round. If your boots are loose at the heel, you can angulate as much as you like, but the initial movement of your feet will not be transmitted through the boot to put the skis on edge. If the edges of the skis are blunt and pitted, the skis will not grip in the turns, and perhaps won't even slide properly. You may be right in thinking that a few holes drilled in the bottom of each ski would slow you down nicely and thank the Lord for small mercies, but have you ever tried to ski with a great gouge in one ski? It feels like there is something nasty stuck to the bottom of your shoe, and you can't get it off. It is vital to know how your kit works, and what to do to maintain it.

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