I started gaining weight as I entered my thirties and my career became more of a burden on my time and energy. I constantly sought the subtle pleasure delivered by washing down a salty, greasy fast-food meal with as much Coca-Cola as I could drink. With my more sedentary, workaday lifestyle, I could no longer avoid the consequences of my unhealthy habits. By fall 2016, I weighed 80 pounds more than I did during the 2005–2006 ski season.
Skiing wasn’t fun anymore; it was almost an annoyance. Weekends became respites from work instead of opportunities to ski.
I had always been a skiing facilitator for many of my skier friends. When others lacked the zeal for skiing, I never did. Some days, I felt like I was dragging my friends to the mountain against their will—for their own good. Or maybe I was overbearing. I figured the exercise and camaraderie would make it all worth it. But I had become the one who needed a facilitator.
When you’re young, you think your priorities will never change. But almost imperceptibly, you give more of yourself to the responsibilities placed upon you. It becomes normal to spend extra hours at work fulfilling duties and expectations. You leave comfortable jobs for more demanding ones. You work to become more important to unimportant people. You must always increase your salary, responsibilities, and contributions. Over time, these small, imperceptible changes accumulate and turn you into a different person. I was prioritizing work over everything else that was important to me. My health and happiness—and my skiing—had suffered as a result.
Skiing had always made me feel better about myself. I felt like a badass when I faced my fears and conquered them, especially on Snowbird’s challenging terrain. Skiing had also been a cure-all. I could always go to the mountains for refuge from external stressors, like work and school. But you can’t escape yourself in the mountains. Whatever emotional baggage you have comes with you. I was carrying a lot of baggage (and weight) with me to the mountains. Skiing became the opposite of escapism. Instead, it reminded me of everything that was wrong.
My skiing experiences to that point had far exceeded my wildest dreams back when I was skiing frozen granular snow at Bristol Mountain in high school. If my time as a skier had to end, I had few regrets. But I still held the idea of skiing in esteem. I still wanted to ski, but I couldn’t, for one reason or another. Skiing had been a significant part of my identity for twenty years. The anxiety I felt when I considered quitting skiing was intense. The uncomfortable prospect of quitting revealed identity-defining aspects of my relationship with skiing that I considered unhealthy, at best, and destructive, at worst. I worried that nothing would fill the void left by skiing’s absence from my life.
I had arranged my life around skiing in Utah. What was the point? I lived only fifteen miles from Snowbird, but I felt farther than when I lived 2,000 miles away. When I finally allowed skiing to drift away from my identity, it released the guilt I felt for not pursuing skiing with the fervor that had brought me to Utah. Quitting skiing wouldn’t fix anything, but I forgave myself for failing to live up to my obstinate, self-imposed standards regarding my participation in the sport.
I didn’t ski at all during the 2016–2017 ski season.
Note: This entry is an edited excerpt from my book A Skier’s Journal.