Skis, Sandwiches and Sore Bodies-Day 57- March 7th, 2018

I woke up this morning feeling pretty tired. To be fair, I did only get 4 and a half hours of sleep. To combat my tiredness, I immediately went downstairs to eat my breakfast and chug my coffee. I was already feeling more awake.

After packing my bag, I noticed it was pretty light compared to last time. To treat myself, I threw in my neck pillow for good measure. I most likely would be super sore from skiing, but my neck wouldn’t be if I could help it.

A little bit later, I headed out the door to the bus stop. I needed to take two buses to catch my third bus to the ski resort. At the bus station, I immediately saw all my friends who were coming. Today it was Elizabeth H., Nick, Ryan, Harry and Anna. While Anna and Harry were there my first ski trip, I really hadn’t skied with them. Harry, Nick and Anna were all pretty good skiers and I wanted to try and keep up with them today. Elizabeth and Ryan were both snowboarding, and a little below my skill level. This was Ryan’s first time snowboarding and Elizabeth was planning to teach him anyway.

To be honest, I think it’s kind of dumb to snowboard in the Alps. You really need wide trails to snowboard, especially for beginners, and the Alps are known for very narrow trails. This makes it hard to edge properly and as a result, 90% of the people at the resort are skiing. Also in my opinion, skiing is much easier to pick up for beginners. To each their own I guess.

I wrote a blog post on the bus to the resort and tried to sleep for a bit. Before we knew it, we arrived at Les Sept Laux and went to rent our gear. I was a little nervous for the first run because I know it would take a few runs to get back in my skiing groove. Surprisingly, I immediately remembered my skills and was feeling good. Granted this was on the bunny slope, but the bunny slope kicked my ass my first time here. Ryan and Elizabeth were struggling a bit, but they came up the lift with Anna and I to the easiest green trail. We stuck around for a bit, but they told us to go ahead and we did.

I felt really good on this run, and for the first time ever, I wasn’t the worst skier on the trail. It was a refreshing feeling. We meet Harry and Nick at the bottom, then the four of us took a longer lift up the mountain. We did a blue trail next, which was the next highest difficulty, and I didn’t fall once.

Here’s Anna, Harry, Nick and I on the chair lift

After this run, we headed to do our first red trail of the day. This specific trail was pretty significant to me because there was one part that I referred to as “PTSD Hill”. Last time I did this trail, I probably fell 20+ times. Most of these was on this one really steep portion which was PTSD Hill. I was a bit nervous going down, but was shocked to find that the trail wasn’t nearly as difficult as I recalled. The infamous hill that destroyed me last time, turned out to be very manageable. I only fell twice on the whole trail.

Here’s a picture of me on one of the trails

I was really feeling confident in my skills and next couple runs went great. They were all reds and I could really feel my improvement. A bit later, we went on this very scenic run that was narrow and along a ridge line. It got a bit steep, and realized I didn’t really have enough room to slow down properly. This led to me going super fast and I decided to just “Send It”. Yeah this didn’t end well. I caught an edge on my ski and did something that Harry later described as a “Full Yard Sale”. I violently flew forward and my poles and skis went soaringin four different directions. Thankfully none of my gear fell of the edge, but this was a pretty hard fall. I’m pretty sure I hit my head, but I had a helmet on, so it was fine.

My confidence fell a bit, but we headed down the trail and had some spectacular views.

The View, Grenoble is visible

After this trail, we decided to go all the way to the summit at the resort. The one here was about 2400 meters or close to 8,000 feet. On the chair lift up, we quickly realized that the visibility would be terrible because we were in the clouds.

Here’s a picture from the lift for reference

We went down a red trail a the top that was decently steep. What made it hard for me was that the visibility was very low. There really weren’t any skiers up there so I just followed my friends. The rest of the trail wasn’t visible after 50 feet. I fell a few times, but made it down in one piece. Afterwards we stopped at a mountain top restaurant to eat lunch. Three out of the four of us had packed lunches, but we wanted to sit inside. I had been carrying a sandwich in my pocket.

After lunch, Nick, Harry and Anna wanted to do some black trails, so I went off by myself for the rest of the day. It’s usually not great to ski by yourself, but I was only doing trails I knew were manageable. The next couple hours were really enjoyable and it was nice to plug in some headphones and just do my own thing. Before I knew it, it was time to head home and I met up with the others.

As soon as I sat down on the bus, I passed out from exhaustion. I would like to thank my neck pillow for its efforts in this.

Back in Grenoble, I took the tram home and stopped at the supermarket to buy a baguette. When I got back, I showered then made myself sandwiches for tonight’s dinner and tomorrow’s lunch. If you can’t tell, I really am in a sandwich phase.

I spent the rest of the night being pretty productive. I did my laundry, studied differential equations, and wrote this blog post.

I headed to bed after, and immediately passed out.