Tough four days

On Thursday and Friday, after a few rest days while feeling under the weather, I returned to CrossFit. I worked hard both nights, and by Saturday morning, I was feeling sore. The squats from Thursday night really affected me, and it was difficult to bend over and pick up my skis all weekend.

We had some new snow over the weekend - about 7" over a two day period, but a lot of the trails were firm and fast. During instructor training on Sunday morning, we witnessed an amazing collision between two guests. We were shocked that the one person walked (well, skied) away from the collision.

For the first time this ski season, we started to explore off-piste terrain, and we decided that it's just not ready yet. We skied two moderate tree runs on Saturday and they were passable, but not a lot of fun. On Sunday, we tried two different very difficult tree runs high on the mountain and found them to be less than fun.

Nonetheless, we had a fun weekend. We skied some steep trails, some nice bump runs on natural and man-made snow, and there was lots of laughter all weekend long. Saturday morning, one of my students had problems with her poles getting off the chairlift, and she didn't make it off the chair. She hit the bar that stops the chair and the lift attendant helped her off the chair. This always reflects badly on the instructor, so I needed a way to get even.

At lunchtime, I ate half of a sandwich and while the offending lift-rider was in the bathroom, I stored the other half of the sandwich in her jacket. I didn't really want to eat it later, but I thought it would be funny for her to carry it around all afternoon. When she found the sandwich, I thought she was going to kill me. I was laughing so hard that she almost succeeded.

We spent Sunday at Lincoln Peak, a part of the Sugarbush resort where we don't ski very often. We were just about done at that side of the mountain, and we took a short break before we rode the Slide Brook Express chair back to the main mountain. The Slide Brook chair is a two mile ride that lasts 11 minutes, and it's important that the kids aren't freezing when we get on the chair. As we left the lodge where we'd warmed up, to ski to the chair, I got a question from my daughter. Here, I'm going to borrow her Facebook post about how the conversation went:

Me: "I'm tired can we go down the easiest trail"
Dad: "ok. Which way"
Me: "the easiest"
Dad: "which way"
Me: "the easiest"
Dad: "which way"
Me: "the easiest"
Dad: "Sarah the name of the trail is which way"
Me: "oh"

This had all of the girls in the group laughing hysterically. It was just too easy to do this to her at the time. It turned out that Which Way had lots of features from recent snow-making, and it might have been our most fun run of the weekend.

All in all, I had another great weekend with the students I teach. When I have a good weekend, it's hard to believe I actually get paid to go skiing with them. Yes, I have a lot of responsibility for their safety and I do teach them things, but it's just plain fun.

Today, I am amazingly sore and tired, and I'm taking a rest day.