“To the eye, you can look confident, but inside there is constant negative chatter,” said Jillian Vogtli to a room full of women. “Your brain is telling you to be scared, and all those negative things, but you need to say, ‘Okay, I hear you, now be quiet. I’ve got this.’”
There were about 12 of us in a room inside the Deer Valley ski lodge and we were suiting up to head out to the mountain where Vogtli, a two-time Olympian, would be leading us through a day of drills and exercises designed to boost our confidence on the slopes. Despite skiing for more than 20 years, I understood what she meant. I turn into a scared, anxious puddle on the slopes, despite always managing to get myself down the mountain in one piece.
As a kid growing up in Maryland, my parents did their best to take me skiing every winter. With four kids in our family, we couldn’t go very far, and we all learned to ski in Pennsylvania. While the mountains weren’t crazy high, the weather conditions were often hazardous, and instead of the powdery snow of the Rockies, patches of ice were the norm. Even through my college years in New England, where I skied some of Vermont’s best mountains, the snow was still icy and crunchy. I never took a bad spill, but I watched many others tumble and skid, gaining various injuries.
The result of skiing this terrain for so many years was that I became a very tense skier. The fear of slipping on ice made me so apprehensive that my body and mind knotted in anxiety anytime I was on a mountain. I even stopped skiing for several years because it had stopped being enjoyable.
When my oldest son was around four, I wanted to give him the opportunity of learning to ski—but I decided he had to learn on the West Coast so he would only know powdery snow. He and I have had the privilege of skiing in places like Aspen, Big Sky, and most recently Deer Valley. When I’ve skied the Rockies these last few years, I immediately notice the difference in the snow. It’s soft and forgiving, and allows you to swish right through it. Still, I felt my body tensing on every turn—I curled my toes, steeled my hips, and squeezed my poles. I knew there was no ice, but I wasn’t been able to undo nearly 40 years of moving a certain way. I wasn’t able to fully give myself over to the fun part of skiing, because my fear of falling was clouding my brain. As my son learned to ski and was clearly enjoying it, I found myself wanting to recapture the joy of skiing I felt as a worry-free kid.
