Amy Reinink

*Editor’s note to my runner and swimmer friends:  The editor is so sorry. She is aware that she’s boring the bejesus out of you by yammering on and on about ski-patrol training in every post. She hopes you’ve at least enjoyed and been able to connect to the “girl has goal, girl chases goal, girl suffers setback, girl ultimately triumphs” plot line. Stay tuned for a running post on Wednesday.*

Guess what, guess what, guess what?

I got to run sleds! And I did good! And it was soooo much fun!

That’s how I’ve been starting most of my conversations since Saturday, the first day I got to work with toboggans during ski-patrol ski and toboggan (S&T) training at Whitetail. Now that my little outburst of excitement is out of the way, here’s how the day went down:

Saturday morning dawned bright and sunny, in stark contrast to the foggy darkness of Thursday night. The S&T instructors gathered us on top of the mountain at 9 a.m., then split us into a few smaller groups. As I stood waiting with my crew, I couldn’t help feeling like I’d just been picked for a team in middle-school gym class, and couldn’t help wondering if I’d been picked first or last.

Look, look, look! It's me, pulling a sled!

The instructor leading our group didn’t bury the lede, and greeted us simply by saying: “This is the sled group.” After a long season of getting hauled around in sleds after an ACL tear derailed my training last year, and after a long few weeks working on exorcising my ski demons before actually getting to pull a sled myself this season, it was all I could do to avoid letting out a little yelp of excitement. We headed to Whitetail’s expert terrain, split up into even smaller groups, and got started.

The instructors I’ve been working with have emphasized for weeks that if I worked out the aforementioned skiing demons (sitting back in my skis, not finishing my turns on one side, etc., etc.) before I got into the handles of a toboggan, life would be much easier once I did. They were so totally right. My first try with an unloaded sled felt really natural, not at all like the Herculean feat of strength and grace I’d been imagining it would be.

The other student in my group and I each took half a run with the sleds unloaded (with no one sitting in them), and then another run with them loaded (with each other sitting in them). That’s when the fun really started. Pulling a loaded sled is more exhilarating and empowering than I can possibly explain. It’s hard not to feel a surge of confidence when you realize you’re smoothly guiding a heavy, unwieldy object down a steeply pitched slope. It’s kind of like a roller-coaster ride you can steer and control.

In short, I felt like I totally nailed my first few runs, and that feeling was backed up by my instructor’s feedback. But perhaps more important was the fact that I totally wiped out on another run. The snow was getting slushy and heavy toward the end of the morning, and we were working on a new skill, transitioning from inside the handles to outside of them, which we’ll need to do when we learn how to pull a sled through the moguls. I was still getting the feeling of how much pressure to apply when engaging the chain—literally a chain on the bottom of the sled that acts as a brake—and fell when I misjudged it.

Grinning like an idiot after finishing my last run.

This was my greatest fear coming into the training—that I would wipe out, that I’d let go of the sled, that the sled would crush me and eject my patient, that I would be responsible for mass chaos and trauma on the mountain. What actually happened: I held onto the sled, engaged the chain, apologized profusely to my fellow student (who was a really good sport about it), and realized that my worst training fear had just happened. With that behind me, I felt like I could actually relax a little, and the second half of that run was maybe my best of the day. I’m not planning to fall in the handles again anytime soon, but I was grateful for the reminder that failure usually isn’t fatal, and is often the starting point for getting better.

I spent most of the week refreshing Weather.com and Weather.gov’s forecasts for Mercersburg, Penn., the closest town to Whitetail, hoping for cold temps and clear skies for my ski-patrol ski-and-toboggan (S&T) training on Thursday night. Instead, it was as if my clicking on “refresh” actually caused the forecasts to worsen, from 80 percent chance of rain to 90 percent to 100 percent, and from .5 inch of accumulation to 1.5 inches.

On the ride up, as rain pounded on the windshield, I pouted and cringed and sighed, and generally approached the evening ahead with the excitement of someone in the middle of the Bataan Death March. I pouted more as I suited up, and kept pouting until I stepped out the door of the patrol’s boot room into the eerily warm, misty, foggy night.

What happened next: I remembered that the things we dread most are often the most fulfilling, and the most fun; that those dreaded things are rarely as bad as we imagine they’ll be; that it’s unfair to judge a training session of any sort before it’s even started. The snow was soft without being mushy, the kind of “hero snow” that makes good skiers look like great ones, and makes even the trickiest drills seem somewhat do-able. The mountain was all but empty, leaving myself, two other candidates and two S&T instructors wide-open slopes to work on. And the mist lent the whole mountain an air of fantasy and possibility, like we could accomplish things in the foggy darkness that we couldn’t in the daylight.

For the first time last night, I felt the beautiful sensation of being able to meld all the tweaks and changes and lessons of the past few weeks into one fluid run. I’m not sure what the conditions will be like during my next training session tomorrow, or whether I’ll feel quite as composed and relaxed when I hit the slopes with the whole class. I do know that a soaking-wet parka is a small price to pay for a ski night like that.

My favorite thing about my new half-time hometown, Virginia Beach? The fact that after just about a minute of slow running from my front door, I reach this view:

I enjoy that view for the rest of my run, about three miles out and back on (mostly) hard-pack sand. I stop and stretch here before running the minute and a half home:

Last week, when I wasn’t skiing (yes, this happens), I worked on a story for WeightWatchers.com’s men’s website for which I interviewed Stephen Walker, one of my favorite sports-psychology sources. The story will be a Q&A about how regular guys trying to lose a few pounds can use sports psychology to help them adopt and maintain a healthier lifestyle, and as usual, I got off the phone with a lot of takeaways for my own life.

Walker said once athletes reach a certain level, their main struggles in the mental game have to do less with day-to-day motivation and more with confidence. “People get insecure,” Walker says. “You need to build that confidence, that sense of capability, that sense of being able to do things and do them well, in order to succeed.”

I plan to use the following tips and insights (some of which will be mentioned in the story, others which are blog-reader exclusives!) in my own training in the coming weeks:

The 80-20 rule: Walker says perfectionists tend to have the hardest time learning new skills or tackling new goals. “You make an 80 percent improvement, but the perfectionist wants more,” he says. “A lot of times, if the perfectionist can’t do more, that’s when they start to give up, and start thinking they can’t achieve their goal.” He says focusing on the 80 percent you’re doing right will help keep your head in the right place.
How I’ll use it: Clearly, this has no personal application. I know no such perfectionists. Ha! Seriously, I promise to focus on the incredible amount of new skills I’m mastering rather than obsessing about what I haven’t figured out yet.

Empty the dishwasher: Walker suggests harnessing the power of your mental game by emptying the dishwasher. Seriously—just emptying the dishwasher, with as little emotion as possible. Don’t give any traction to the whiny voice that comes out during household chores. If you can train yourself to do this while you’re emptying the dishwasher, Walker says the skill will translate to your workouts, too.
How I used it: I tried this trick while doing the dishes after arriving home on Friday afternoon after nearly two weeks away. It seemed absurdly simple, and I did fine until about halfway through, when I started scouring a pot Steve used to make chicken chili for a squadron chili cookoff. This is usually my job, and I usually win something if there’s judging. When I arrived home, Steve informed me that his chili came in last. I felt a pang of sad, wifely guilt as I scoured that pot. As I moved onto the Tupperware I’d been using for my meals away from home, my exact mental self-talk was: “This is stupid. Stupid dishes. Stupid.” Right-o. I’ll be trying this trick again.

Writing it down: Walker recommends keeping a small journal in which you jot down one thing you did each day that helped you progress toward your goal. He says you need to write about it with enough precision that “when you look at it six months down the road, you can put yourself back into that workout and realize how important that little success was in contributing to your overall development.”
How I’m using it: By noting a few pieces of progress from my last two times on the snow on Wednesday and Thursday. On Wednesday, when I struggled to master some one-legged drills in icy conditions, I learned a strategy for skiing on ice: Still set your edge (as opposed to sliding until the ice is gone), but place the edge gently, with a lighter-than-usual amount of pressure. On Thursday, I learned that to avoid sitting back in my skis during turns, I basically have to imagine I’m launching my upper body forward like an alpine jumper. I feel like later this season, I’ll look back on the latter especially and view it as one of those game-changing light-bulb moments.

How was your weekend? What little things did you do that helped you progress toward your goal (whatever your goal may be)?

To all of you who left caring, concerned comments upon reading my post on Wednesday: Everything’s fine here! Situation normal! (How are you?)

Since Wednesday, I’ve had two good nights of ski-patrol ski-and-toboggan (S&T) training during which a few major changes have clicked, and have actually started to feel less like crazy drills and more like muscle memory. I’ve also had a few relaxing nights with friends, and have settled into what initially seemed like an impossibly chaotic schedule, which has in turn allowed me to chill out a bit and let the training process be what it’s going to be.

On Thursday, I carpooled to and from Whitetail with one of the instructors I’ve been working with fairly often. On the way back to D.C., I joined him and his family at Krumpe’s, a cult-favorite doughnut place down a back alley just off I-270 in Hagerstown, Md. The doughnuts are sold throughout the Hagerstown area, but true addicts (which I might officially be now) know to go to the store late at night to get the doughnuts fresh from the fryers.

Usually, I find doughnuts too spongy to be satisfying. But the chocolate-cake doughnuts from Krumpe’s are like doughnuts that want to be brownies when they grow up. Is there a happier state of being than munching on one of those sweet, dense treats on the way home from a good night of skiing while listening to Bob Marley croon that everything’s going to be all right? If so, I’m not sure I want to know about it.

A plate of Krumpe's doughnuts for Steve=my attempt to win back brownie points.

I’m back in Virginia Beach until next Thursday, when I’ll head up to Whitetail again. It’s safe to say I’ve lost some wifey-brownie points for being gone for such a long time. Good thing Steve likes doughnuts better than brownies, anyway …

Last time you heard from your favorite ski zombie, she was high on life after making a few little ski adjustments that made a big difference during her first weekend of ski-patrol ski-and-toboggan training. She was optimistic and enthusiastic. The best way to explain what has happened since then is in brief snapshots.

Tuesday night: I crash my OEC (ski-patrol medical) buddy Buck’s ski-patrol shift after two days of work in D.C. We take some runs, have some laughs and eat some dinner. Toward the end of the night, we help another patroller put an injured guest on a backboard, working together as if we were students again. “It’s like we didn’t skip a beat!” Buck says, and I agree.

Wednesday night: I am back on the mountain to work with one of the two main ski-and-toboggan instructors during his regular shift. It is pouring rain. The instructor eyes me warily. I glumly tell him I won’t ask him to ski with me, considering the weather. He suggests that we do some dryland exercises instead, hands me the two ends of a piece of rope, then proceeds to tug on the ropes as if they’re handles of a toboggan, so I get the feeling of being thrown off my balance while I’m steering it. A patroller I’ve never met before laughs as he watches us. “It’s like she’s a puppy, and you’re playing with her to tire her out,” he says. Later, I think about how I should have told him that like a puppy, I have tiny, sharp teeth that hurt like hell when I bite.

Thursday morning: I get some information that changes my understanding of how this year’s training will go for me—that it will be more rigorous and longer, and will require more time away from home, less of an accelerated program and more of a 2012 ski odyssey. Even as I realize this will ultimately make me a better ski patroller, I doubt for the first time my ability to get it done this season, or at all. I spend the rest of the day working on my snowplowing and side-slipping. I miss Steve. I miss home. I start wondering why this ever seemed like a good idea. Before he leaves for the day, the supervisor of the paid patrol gives me a concerned look and pats me on the back. “We’re going to get you there,” he says firmly. I try to believe him.

Thursday night: I join several other candidates in working with another ski-and-toboggan instructor on his regular shift. I am exhausted from the get-go after spending most of the day snowplowing and side-slipping, which is kind of like getting ready for an evening 5K by doing a speed workout the morning of the race. I feel like I’m struggling with even the most basic skills. Video analysis shows that I’m locking out my downhill leg during my turns, still sitting back in my skis. I spend the night willing my quads to work and willing my eyes not to tear up in frustration, succeeding at neither.

Friday night: I work the day shift in a Day-Quil haze, thanks to a cold I’ve caught while staying in the patrol’s bunk room, located in a ventilation-free room below the rental department. Steve drives up from Virginia Beach and arrives to find me curled up on the couch, fast asleep, while other patrollers’ kids watch “Snow Dogs” on the bunk room television. We go out for pizza. It is the first time I’ve left Whitetail for days, besides a few trips to the McDonald’s in Clear Spring, which has cell reception and WiFi for work sessions. I tell Steve about the week. He tells me I’ve lost perspective on the whole thing, and asks if I can hear how impatient, perfectionistic and self-deprecating I’m being, and how self-defeating that all is. I pout, and tell him to cut me a break. I know in the pit of my stomach that he’s right.

Saturday: I go through the second official S&T class still feeling terrible about myself, getting through all the drills but enjoying very few of them. This time, video analysis shows that I need to “loosen up.” In the afternoon, I ride the lift up with the instructor I’d worked with in the morning, who senses something’s wrong. He asks if I’ve been free-skiing at all since starting the training, knowing that I haven’t been. So we take turns following each other through some nice, soft bumps along the side of a run. It’s so much fun, I finish each section giggling. I have my best runs of the day, and manage to incorporate most of the skills I’ve been obsessing about. Turns out it’s much easier to ski well when you’re not in the middle of a nervous breakdown. I finish the day feeling hopeful and optimistic.

Once I accepted that there would be dark spots, everything seemed much brighter.

Sunday: On our way to dinner, Steve suggests I draw on sports-psychology lessons I’ve learned while training for various endurance events. As an example, he asks whether I ever doubted I’d finish my first marathon. He doesn’t expect me to say yes. I start thinking about how low I felt after my first-ever 17-miler, when I melted in the Florida heat and walked the last two miles, certain I could never finish a full 26.2. Then, I think about how I called my friend Sarah to tell her I wouldn’t be going to Nashville with her, and how she gently told me that it’s perfectly normal to feel awful during a long run, that the long run is sometimes just a dark point of training to be gotten through. I remember that a good training cycle isn’t about the absence of low points, but instead about how you handle those moments of intense self-doubt. When I start looking at some of the events of the past week as a perfectly normal dark point in training to be gotten through, everything ahead seems much brighter.

Monday: We stop at the DC Ski Center on our way out of town to shop for a new helmet and goggles for me. Steve suggests I stick around D.C. for the rest of the week to squeeze in a bit more training. I melt with gratitude, and take him up on it. So here I am.

Consider this a belated (mostly) Wordless Wednesday. I missed actual (mostly) Wordless Wednesday because I’ve been staying at Whitetail, alternating skiing with working with the occasional sleeping. More on that later.

For now, can I tell you about the best part of each day up here? It’s when we’re opening the mountain, and I get views like this pretty much all to myself. (See below).

Happy weekend!

First, a brief editor’s note: The editor did not mean to inspire alarm by mentioning her move to Virginia Beach in her last post. She would like to emphasize that she will still be living in the D.C. area for a large chunk of each month, and will be going back and forth between her temporary home there and the D.C. area, where she will continue writing what she hopes are compelling, interesting stories for her wonderful D.C.-area clients. She will continue to be available for swim dates, trail runs and other D.C. adventures, and will try not to brag too much about her long runs along the Chesapeake Bay in Virginia Beach. Also, the post-move chaos has mostly subsided now, and the editor will start communicating with the outside world again very soon.

One more brief editor’s note: If you’re new to this blog and aren’t already tired of hearing the editor whine about the ACL tear that derailed her ski training last winter after months of medical training, read about it here and here and here.

Now: The weekend. After getting our stuff semi-settled in Virginia Beach, Steve and I did the only sensible thing: Took off and drove up to Whitetail, which opened a bunch more terrain last week. We woke up at 6:30 a.m. to help open the mountain. Then, at 9 a.m., I joined this year’s ski-patrol candidate class on their first day of ski-and-toboggan (S&T) training.

Whitetail opened a few of its intermediate slopes last week—hooray! PHOTO CREDIT: Whitetail Resort webcam.

The class consisted of three hours of thigh-busting ski drills and skills, including a lot of snowplowing. A LOT of snowplowing. Do not underestimate the impact that snowplowing will have on your glutes.

My snowplowing buddies. I wonder if they're as sore as I am?

After a brief break for lunch, the rest of the class broke off to do mountain operations, which I limped through last year with my own candidate class. I asked the head S&T instructor, a former pro skier who’s known for transforming mediocre skiers into great ones, if he’d keep working with me in the afternoon. He agreed, and we started by working on my pole plants.

The thing I’ve done with my ski poles since I started skiing at age 7? That’s not what you’re supposed to do with poles. Previously, my poles (and therefore hands, and therefore upper body) were always lagging behind me—or worse, were held out absurdly far in front of me to compensate. So I worked on planting the pole downhill from me to unweight my edges each turn (don’t ask me where I was planting it, other than “the wrong place”). The first run I tried it, the change felt absurd and wrong. The second run felt good, except for the fact that every fiber of my being wanted to revert to my old, bad habit. The third run, I looked up at the instructor to see if I’d done good—and found him beaming.

The pole thing fixed, like, seven other bad habits I’ve been harboring. This will make sense to anyone who’s worked on their running or swimming form, or diagnosed a phantom overuse injury—our body parts don’t work in isolation, so of course changing one thing about your form will change everything! All because I fixed the dumb thing I was doing with my poles, I now finish my turns, lean forward rather than sitting back, engage both my edges. I have more balance and stability. We skied a few more runs to make sure I’d gotten it—I had.

I had also gotten REALLY sore, which the next 24 hours did not help with. A brief snapshot: I skied around a bit more, because although I was tired, the snow was so nice! I popped out of my skis and ran up one of the beginner slopes while wearing my ski boots with a few other patrollers to respond to an injured guest who needed to be put on a backboard. I hoofed around in ski boots a bit more after convincing a kid who was hopping around on one foot to come into the clinic and get his ankle checked out. I helped close the mountain at 10 p.m. that night, and woke up at 6:30 a.m. to help open it the next day. When I finally got home last night, I was beyond wrecked—like, post-marathon sore, the kind of sore in which you make funny noises when you have to stand up.

Somewhere in the middle of all of this, I realized my mentality had shifted. Last year, I was borderline obsessed with the coveted red coat, which you get after your training is totally complete and you’re a full ski patroller, and felt kind of pathetic and alone and absurd in my blue candidate coat after my classmates graduated. This year’s candidate coats are actually much more reasonable, and are simply regular red ski-patrol coats that have “candidate” written in the white cross. But as I was going through the class on Saturday morning, practicing the skiing techniques I’ll use once we’re in the handles of a toboggan, I realized the whole coat thing was kind of beside the point. I felt the same way in the afternoon, when I wasn’t thinking at all, but rather just focusing on each turn in that coveted state of flow. Somewhere along the way, I stopped caring around the end result, and stopped obsessing about whether I could do it, whether I was scared to do it, whether I’d be good enough at it … and started making like a Nike ad and just doing it.

Now, I’m not obsessed with when I’ll get the darn coat (which, for the record, I still want). Instead, I’m obsessed with when I’ll get to play with sleds, when I’ll get to transport my first patient, and when I’ll get to beat the pants off Steve while skiing with him.

At the end of the day, my cheeks were bright red—not from sunburn, but because I was smiling so big the whole day, my cheeks were sore from scraping the bottom of my sunglasses.

Better yet, as I write this, it’s snowing in Silver Spring!

So we moved. For at least the next several months, I’ll be splitting my time between Silver Spring and a cool duplex a block away from the beach in Virginia Beach, Va. (stay tuned for photos of my new daily run along the Chesapeake Bay).

As part of the move, I threw out a phenomenal amount of stuff I don’t need anymore: carefully-marked maps of Silver Spring running routes I now know by heart; a knee immobilizer from last year’s ACL tear; a hair-straightening iron from college; a dust-covered shot-glass collection from an unnamed period of time that certainly would not be high school. As I chucked each item in the “donate” and “recycle” boxes, I was grateful for the space each dismissal created—in our office, and in my life.

Of course, that makes room for the new: New challenges and adventures and goals that have no use for straighteners of any kind (knee or hair). In the spirit of that newness, I wanted to pass along the links to several new (or just new to me) running-health-wellness blogs I’ve stumbled upon recently:

• A new look for Nourishing The Soul, worth checking out for the pretty, quote-filled, warm-fuzzy-inducing homepage alone. It’s a blog about eating disorders and body image, but has great info and insights for anyone trying to live an active, healthy life
• Adam Goucher’s Run The Edge blog
• Nobody Cares About Your Run, a new running blog from a friend of a friend
• The lovely and talented District Chocaholic has started an Obligatory Tri Blog

Have you stumbled upon anything new and exciting recently? Or dismissed any relic of a past self from your current life?

Whitetail opened on Dec. 30. We were there Dec. 31-Jan. 2, and as luck would have it, so were a few of the ski patrol’s ski-and-toboggan instructors. So after months of waiting and weeks of obsessing about the stubbornly warm weather, I actually started the remainder of my ski patrol training, which I will finally finish this winter after an ACL tear derailed my training last winter.

Photo credit: Whitetail Resort webcam.

There weren’t many runs open, so I basically spent three days doing various drills—such as skiing on one leg to force myself to stop sitting back during my turns—on the slope pictured above. Much like running, it’s actually easier to practice good form when you’re going faster. So despite the fact that only beginner terrain was open, I left Whitetail feeling happily exhausted and sore—and ready to get into the meat of the training next weekend.

How did you spend your New Year’s Eve?