A lot of books have been written and thousands of magazine articles published on how to stay in shape for skiing.
Right now, I am trying to get in shape to play golf without running out of golf balls before I finish playing 18 holes.
There was a time, long ago, when I could move from the ski hill to my surfboard without missing a beat. In the early 1960s I switched from surfing to racing a Pacific Catamaran three or four years before my friend Hobie invented his catamaran and revolutionized sailing forever. He built more than 250,000 boats with his name on the sail. I thought it was a fabulous invention.
But throughout my life I have been reluctant to do any of the exercises that all of the books recommended. Somehow, as I switched gears as the snow melted, I managed to play hard at recreation and simply enjoy it and not have to set an exercise schedule. Many people run today, ride the bicycle tomorrow and lift weights the next day.
I have a big stack of exercise stuff in the basement that I used a few times but soon abandoned. There are weights I could strap onto my ankles so I did not have to walk so far to burn calories. There is another set of weights that I could wrap around my wrists, but those lasted me a couple of days then they went to a garage sale recently.
I even tried a physical therapist after I broke my back skiing two years ago. But as soon as I moved back to Montana for the winter he stayed here in Washington with no one to shout at.
I have a great mountain bike hanging in the garage but unfortunately I have recently lost two good friends to bicycle accidents when they went over the handlebars and died on the spot. Maybe I really have a negative feeling about getting in shape for skiing in July. And I am in way over my head. I am writing my autobiography and I don’t want to miss a single day of writing about my life of lurching from one near disaster to the next.
Writing about my early life has been a real blast. When you put down on paper some of the stuff that you lived through you begin to find out how you got where you are, wherever that may be.
Right now, between me and my co-author Morten Lund, I have pretty well chronicled the years up to and including 1950 when I taught skiing at Squaw Valley when there were only two rope tows and one chairlift to handle the weekend crowds that sometimes topped more than one-hundred people. And nowhere in my writing so far have I discovered that I ever exercised at any time.
Maybe I changed from a skinny 14-year-old kid to a stronger one when I started getting up at 4:30 to deliver 300 newspapers two or three mornings a week. Walking for two and a half hours with a load of newspapers in a bag over my shoulders could be construed as exercise, but I did not know it at the time because I was being paid for each delivery day.
When I fell and broke my back, I stopped skiing for the rest of the year. A week ago my next door neighbor, Hobie, fell and broke his hip and another friend got such a bad cramp in his leg the other night that his Achilles tendon just snapped off of his heel. I guess there is a point in everyone’s life where this kind of thing just happens. Anyone I talk with knows 10 other people with stupid injuries because of their age. As my wife’s friend Nancy says, “Men all over the world die every day just being themselves.”
So give up simple things like keeping score when you are playing golf because you cannot do it as well as you could 20 years ago. Is it that important to beat your buddies, anyway?