X Country

This weekend we hit up Harwood Hills, a cross-country skiing park about 90 minutes out of Toronto. I'd only been cross-country skiing a few times in my life, and none of those had been after the age of 17. Oliver was even less experienced; he had pretty much never strapped a pair of skis to his feet. However, since my memories of the sport were that it was a) a lot of fun and b) not too difficult to pick up at a basic level, we were cautiously optimistic as we arrived.

As it turned out, we were pretty awesome! Awesome for beginners, that is. 95% of our fellow skiers were, of course, better than us, but they also carried their own(ed) skis in fancy ski bags and chatted with each other about how many kilometers they had logged so far on this particular Saturday. A quick survey of the scene also told me that Oliver and I were the only people who didn't own spandex cross-country skiing pants. When I say that we were "awesome" then, I don't mean that we weren't the objects of pity/scorn at any given moment. There were a lot of these, of course...
and some were pretty spectacular. There were a number of two-person pile-ups, a few screams cutting through the pristine silence of the snowy trail, and one face plant while skiing down a small hill (cough Oliver cough). After a couple hours though, we started to improve pretty dramatically. As my body repeated the same movements over and over again, it started to remember some of the techniques it had used in the past. For his part, Oliver watched the people passing him - the spandex pantsed, the elderly, the very young - and picked up some of the things they were doing. By the end of the day, we were still falling and probably still looked a little clumsy, but we were skiing! We picked up the pace and started to get mesmerized by the trail. I kept telling myself to slow down, but I couldn't. I wanted to push harder, keep going, feel even better. Oliver, as evidenced by his frequent cries of "gold medal, Germany!" wanted to beat me.

At the very end of our last trail, there was an unexpected, steep hill. Oliver flew down it, and stayed upright. It was a rush, he explained a minute later as we made our way back to the chalet. Maybe we should try downhill skiing next. Then he fell backwards, ski poles flailing.

I shouldn't act too smug, though. I wasn't even wearing my skis at this point. I had taken them off and walked down the hill.