Skiing

I went skiing this past weekend.  Or should I say I repeatedly slid ungracefully down a hill on two long sticks attached to my feet and landed on my butt this past weekend?  Either way, that’s what I did.  My husband Sean is a fantastic skier, and has been skiing pretty much since infancy when his parents put him on a pair of skis and held him between their legs until he got the hang of it himself.  He (literally) skis circles around me.  Sometimes backwards circles.

Here's a picture of baby Sean on a ski trip!  Awww, isn't he adorable?

My family does not ski.  The first time I went skiing was right before my 15^th birthday, with Sean.  I was pretty bad, but I think I did even worse this weekend.

Now don’t get me wrong – I like to ski.  It’s always been one of those activities that scares the living crap out of me, in a good way, so I’m cursing and praying as I ski down the hill and then laughing as I fall and do it all over again.  Things like that really are fun to me.  For example, I enjoy water tubing in the summer.  Not the leisurely relaxing-on-a-tube-in-the-water kind of tubing, but the being-pulled-by-a-boat-at-unsafe-speeds-until-you-are-thrown-off-the-tube kind of tubing that I’ve done with Sean and my friends since we were teenagers.  Also, my favorite ride at carnivals is the Zipper, which is basically an overpriced near-death experience with flashing lights.

No matter how hard you try not to, you WILL prepare for death while riding the Zipper.

But I just didn’t seem to be feeling the whole near-death thing this past weekend.  It just wasn’t what I was into.  It was a lot colder than I had expected it to be, and it also became apparent that I’m just not as fit as I once was.  So I had driven two-and-a-half hours and paid almost $100 between the lift ticket and ski rentals and was exhausted, cold, frightened, and miserable by my second trail.  For a (very) short amount of time I was determined to keep going.  Skiing is one of my husband’s very favorite things in the whole wide world, so I knew that my wimping out two trails in was not going to make him the happiest of campers.  Even if I told him to go off and ski his heart out without me, I knew he wouldn’t be out for too long knowing that I was just sitting at the lodge.  My other motivation to keep going was the money we’d spent just to get up to the mountain.  Being not particularly affluent folk at this point in our lives, the money we’d spent on the lift tickets was not small change.  This ski trip was a real treat, and I was determined to make the most of it.

But as I rode on the four-person ski lift with Sean and some lady and her tiny little child, the wind and snow on my face and the annoyingly comforting words of the mom on the other end of the chair digging into me with equal force, I knew I’d had enough.  Sean was talking to the woman about her kid, cooing over how cute he was and how it was great that he was skiing so young, and all I could think about was how horrible of a skier I was, how that little four-year-old boy could probably ski better than I could, and how Sean would probably prefer to ski with that little twerp anyway given that I was practically in tears as I wobbled spread-eagled down the mountain.

“I’m done,” I told Sean as we got off the ski lift.  He was upset for a minute, but then told me to relax for a bit at the lodge while he took on a few diamonds in this sweet, comforting way he has when I’m upset.  “We'll leave after that,” he told me.  But apparently that wasn’t enough for me.  The combination of the cold, my aching body, and my own knowledge that I was acting like a total baby just made me resent his kindness.  Suddenly I was all like, “No!  I can do this!  I’m going to ski!  I’m going to ski all day!  I’m not a baby!”  Which of course only made me more of a baby.

Needless to say, I only made it through one more trail.  I was still protesting at the bottom, but when I saw the line for the ski lift and thought about having to go down one more endless track of snow I caved in.  I went to the lodge and ate Craisins and Fritos while Sean did his diamonds, slowly regaining feeling in my extremities, and as soon as he came back we left.

I still feel kind of guilty for wimping out and not skiing for very long.  I wish I could have just found some inner strength and kept skiing at least a little bit more.  But I guess at the end of the day you can’t push yourself too hard, right?  So I want to know what you guys think.  At what point do you draw the line when you really don’t want to do something, but know that it would be really lame to quit?  This is something I struggle with in general, being rather stubborn when it comes to giving things up, a topic which I’m sure we’ll return to.  So let me know - have you ever had an experience like this?  If you did, perhaps you were able to deal with it more gracefully than I was.