Author: chuck goolsbee

Many of you have noticed I haven’t updated the site in several days… that is because I’m on vacation. Once a year I visit my parents, who have had the remarkable foresight to retire to a ski resort. Yeah… tough life but I gotta admire their smarts for that! So we bring the grandkids and test the limits of my long-gone lateral meniscus on the slopes.

It seems that 4 straight days of fixed-heel skiing is all my knee can take anymore. I left the telemark skis at home this year to lighten our luggage load, and I’m paying for it now. The on/off alpine/telemark shift helps me last the whole week, but relentless fixed-heel skiing wears me down. I realize to many people this is completely counter-intuitive, but Telemark turns are much easier on my bad knee than fixed heel alpine skiing is. In alpine boots, every shock is transmitted into my knee as bone-to-bone contact. On tele’s impacts are transmitted through a bent knee… so it is far less stressful.

Of course, my toes are happier, as my tectonic shift from leather (Asolo Snowpines!) to plastic tele boots a few years ago leads to a yearly loss of a toenail or two. The suffering we do for fun! I still haven’t fallen for the overly Alpine, up to the knee Tele boots… and have a barely-over-the-ankle Garmont “touring boot” for my freeheeling pinhead ski style. I also have tele skis that are 200cm long… some Wolf Cold Smokes. I guess I’m a throwback to my 80’s tele retro beginnings. I still have my snowpines and 205cm Karhu XCDextremes in the garage at home.

The week started on old snow and sunshine and I was happy to not have the teles, and pin-skiing on hard snow is no fun really. But the powder arrived yesterday and I stare longingly at the free-heelers and banged my knee up so bad I had to take today off.

Back on the slopes tomorrow and I suspect you won’t see another word here until sometime next week.

Tough life, but somebody has to live it.

(oh, and I had to fix my parent’s wireless network… ugh.)

A footnote: I skiied a few days ago for half a day without poles. I found it a liberating experience! I tend to be a lazy, hip/foot focussed skier anyway due to my bad knee, and as such the poles become sort of useless. Telemarking for 20-some years has given me great balance and edge control (all alpine skiers should spend time on teles, or even snowboards, to truly learn edges and balance. I snowboarded for a few years back in the 80s.) so I can shift edge to edge without much upper-body fuss. I don’t do much serious mogul skiing anymore as the loss of all shock-absorption properties in my right knee make it excruciating. I can do it, I just can’t function for days afterwards! As such, I have found poles to be sort of plastic and metal appendixes… useless extra stuff hanging off the end of useful bits.

It was great fun to ski without them. I may continue to do so.