In January 2024, I went skiing for the first time ever. There’s lots out there you can read if it’s your first time, so I won’t list out everything. Instead, here’s some short points about my experience.
Before this trip, I’d never skied. By the end of it I was comfortable going down slopes and knew I could control my decent. There’s still plenty of progress to be made, but you can become stable on the skis in a few days.
🎓 Learning to ski
- Watch a YouTube video before you ever get on the skis - it’s useful to have some prior expectations of what to do, before you have skis on
- There’s a lot of technique involved and therefore a lot to remember, I would focus on practicing/focusing-on two things at a time, so that they’d become second nature to me and I could work on the next two
- Get private lessons, the progress I made with three 2 hour one-on-one lessons was crazy
- Fall a few times, the fear is worse than the falls (I actually enjoyed 95% of the falls I had)
🤕 Staying safe
- Focus on staying out of the way of people ahead of you, it’s not your responsibility to look out for people behind you and you’ll end up causing yourself problems if you do
- Let go of the poles when you fall
- Be confident, be assured, but don’t be stupid - the injuries can escalate very quickly
- Don’t push your luck - I had an arbitrary rule of not pushing it on my first holiday, if I had any doubts, I would back out
- Learn to slide for the especially steep parts
⛄ Having a good time
- Take a bumbag with some essentials, make sure it includes SPF lip balm and water (snacks also preferable too)
- Wear layers you can take off when it gets hot
- Go with friends who are at a similar pace
- Two hours before the lifts close, make sure you have an idea of how you’re getting back
- Après ski is worth it, but if you need to ski back down take it easy (in drinking and skiing)
- We found a bar at the bottom of the slopes, so could drink without worrying about skiing
- Go to the sauna after each day of skiing