I’m sure most of you are wondering what my title means. Carve? Carve meat? No. Carve snow. Or in the words of Google dictionary…
SKIING: make (a turn) by tilting one’s skis on to their edges and using one’s weight to bend them so that they slide into an arc
Where it all Started
I started skiing when I was four years old. My dad took me to our local Connecticut ski mountain and taught me using the good old “human leash” in which I was attached using a harness and my dad was holding onto the ropes as he skied behind me. He taught me to “pizza pie” and turn down the bunny slope instead of going straight down at 100 MPH and crashing into the innocent folks at the bottom of the slope. I hated it at first, because why would anyone purposefully put their body through that kind of physical and mental torture?? However, after a few years I started to really get the hang of it. Ever since then, I have been a complete ski-aholic, I like to say. Up until I got to college, I spent each and every one of my winter weekends skiing in Vermont.
Me – Skiing = Maniac
So you can only imagine what kind of withdrawals I went through my freshman winter out here in the middle of Pennsylvania…pure torture. It is the first weekend of December, 2012. I’m sitting in my dorm room on Facebook when I come across my brother’s album titled “Ski Season has Begun”. Countless pictures of my entire family taking advantage of the almost empty slopes on opening weekend in Stratton, Vermont. My stomach dropped. All I wanted to do was get on a bus straight to Vermont…but of course we’re in State College, so that wasn’t going to happen. It was then that I began to realize that skiing isn’t just something I enjoy doing, it’s something that I need to do, for my own sanity that is, as I’m what you would call an “adrenaline junkie”.
But Why?
Being an adrenaline junkie basically means I’m addicted to the rush that I get when I’m skiing. But why skiing you ask? It’s that feeling of being on top of a mountain, looking around at all the other mountain peaks around you and then looking down the ski slopes to see the tiny little specks that are cars and people and houses. The feeling is like no other. When I look around and smell the crisp mountain air it’s like I have the whole world at the tip of my fingers and nothing can hurt me. As this article on the health benefits of skiing says, “There’s no place like outside for getting fresh air, a substance that cleans lungs and mind like nothing else known to humans. And skiing, whether on a tree-lined trail or atop a sunny ridge, is an ideal way to pump fresh air and blood while soaking up sunlight.”
And that, my friends, seems like the perfect thought to leave you all with today.
