Skiing Scared

Like most recreational skiers, my season consists of two parts: December through march, when I ski erratically enough to consider hurling my Salomons into a Dumpster, followed by April, when everything finally clicks. I've got my ski legs. I'm linking turns effortlessly on tough terrain. I'm confident. I'm in control. And I'm spending all of my time on the chairlift trying to figure out how I can telecommute from Vail.

Then the season ends. I toss my gear in the back of a closet, and I lose whatever edge I've gained during those last heady spring days. Come November, I never hit that first run with the effortless grace I attained on the previous season's final day. Once again, I'll grind through till April, when hopefully I'll regain my groove.

This is skiing as usual for adults with real jobs who are lucky if they can log in 30 days a year of snow time. We waste days lurching cluelessly from run to run, hoping that if we just "attack the mountain aggressively" (or whatever the current insight du jour is), we'll at last transform ourselves into the experts we know we are meant to be.

No wonder we're frustrated.

"Skiing isn't for people who think that all they need to get to the next level are a few tips and hotter skis," says Chris Fellows, 40, director of the North American Ski Training Center (NASTC). "I wish I could report that there are shortcuts. There are no quick fixes, but there are fixes. They're called practice and patience."

A senior examiner and the head of education for the western division of the Professional Ski Instructors of America, Fellows is at the top of the recreational-skiing food chain: He's so good, he instructs instructors. And while he can't recommend any shortcuts, he does suggest NASTC's Jump-Start Ski Program to give you a jump on the ski season. The program is a weeklong thigh-burning, confidence-boosting, ski-training extravaganza that features six hours of coaching daily, individual video analysis, and evening clinics that run the gamut from dryland training to technique analysis.

In the Age of the Coach, when everyone from corporate execs to shell-shocked parents hires experts to show them the ropes, Jump-Start makes sense. To get better, get hooked up with a top-flight trainer. So I sign up for the program and find myself at Whistler-Blackcomb in British Columbia on the first weekend of ski season, staring down at Buick-size moguls on a run called Choker.

There are 18 students in the workshop. All are intermediate or advanced skiers; all are hoping this time to get a head start on the season. The day is cloudy and mild, the snow unaccountably good -- ultradry powder, more like mid-January stuff. Fellows leans over his poles, waiting for me to take off. You'd never peg him for an expert skier. He's unprepossessing, of medium height and build. His coaching style has no frills, no gimmicks, and no buzzwords. His method is straightforward: He reads your body language, he watches you ski, and he guides you from there.

At the moment, my body language is unequivocal: Choker is making me choke.

"Trust your skills," Fellows advises me. "Don't try too hard. Relax, and let gravity win."

This is reassuring banter, and Fellows knows it. He's just trying to calm me down so he can see what I can do. I can ski this run. I just don't think I can ski it well. My feet are cramping in my boots. Fellows simply waits.

"Fellows's real job is to get you to face down your monsters," says Fred Wee, director of product marketing for Hyperion Solutions, a Silicon Valley software company. This is Wee's third Jump-Start ski vacation.

Every skier has at least one monster -- a confidence-devouring gremlin that's roused by the sight of a steep, icy chute or a mogul field studded with trees. Like a grizzly that's drawn out of the woods by the scent of blood, our monsters are awakened by the bumps, by the steeps, by the downright scary. Here, then, is how the experts at Jump-Start helped four of us brave our inner demons.

The Monster: Fear of Wiping Out
Unleashed by: The Steeps

Ralph Deadwyler, 44, is a tall, taut technical specialist at IBM who lives in Fremont, California. He's one of those people who seems to put in 48-hour days. Besides racking up overtime, he works out four or five times a week and gets in lots of skiing at Tahoe. Growing up in Cleveland, he played plenty of basketball, to which he credits his agility, coordination, and balance.

Still, he suffers. Early in his skiing career, he got stuck at the top of Mammoth Mountain on terrain that would have made even Picabo Street shudder.

"Riding up the chairlift," Deadwyler recalls, "I looked down and saw a nicely groomed run that appeared to have just a little angle to it. Then I got to the top of the run, and it dropped like the side of a building. I was frozen there for half an hour. I would have made a deal with God, the devil, anyone who would have gotten me off of that mountain. Basically, I fell all the way down. It was an awful experience, and it left me overly cautious, even now."