Personally, skiing doesn’t really do anything for me anymore. This statement doesn’t warrant further explanation, but I’m going to give one anyway.

I quit skiing altogether back in the early 90s, mainly because fly fishing was so much more cost effective. Then I had kids. As if children weren’t expensive enough, we enrolled them in ski lessons. Now, I’m sitting on a hotel-room bed in Leadville next to a slumbering eleven-year-old who is comatose with the exhaustion of skiing two Super Giant Slalom training runs, and one race. It’s good he’s asleep, for there’s another training run and two more races first thing in the morning.

Race officials asked me to serve as a gate keeper today, so I did. This put me about 150 yards downhill from the start, at the top of the first pitch. There may have been more exciting places to view the training runs and the race, but not many more interesting. By the time the kids reached the gate nearest me, the speed they managed to carry off the flats at the top of the course either gave them pause or broke their boredom. It was a good place to observe racer confidence, and I was pleased to witness some of the more timid racers figure out that pitch wasn’t as daunting as they first thought. Life lessons can show up in the most unusual places.

Where sports are concerned, I have taught my children soccer, skiing, and fly fishing. Why? Well, it’s simple, really. I still can. But much more importantly, the first is a team sport, the second is an individual sport, and the third is a highly personal, contemplative sport. I figure that if I teach my kids a bit about each, each will be able to discern a preference, not of a sport per se, but of the kind of sport. I think of this as another in a long line of ways to equip my children to make meaningful choices…

That’s why I say skiing doesn’t really do anything for me anymore.