Nordic Skiing

I’ve just been Nordic skiing; in Norway.

Yes, I was quite surprised, too. I had forgotten.

It might have been a holiday of a lifetime in some ways, but my brain didn’t seem to want to go.

Dare I admit that? Just to be clear; not the part of my brain that loves new experiences and super landscapes and evening board-games and possible Northern lights.

That part of me was completely on board.

So was the part of me that fancied joining three generations of the fantastic family I married into, on skis.

So, indeed, was the part that wanted to share the kids’ excitement on their first flight.

So just to be clear; I wouldn’t have missed it.

But the whingey part of my brain knew that this was going to be tough. Skiing, you see, is outside the routine; all the clever ‘cheats’ I have that get my brain through every day, would no longer be helpful. I was supposed to be able to do stuff like keeping track of passports; packing the right diabetic equipment and getting it through security. Recognizing my own bags. Recognizing my own ski equipment. And clothes! I needed to be aware how much the bags were allowed to weigh. Using the phone without WIFI would probably cost a fortune. Even remembering three or so Norwegian words (Hallo. Sarry. Tussen Tak) was a challenge. As was trying not to take out my stress on the people around me…. (Sarry. Tussen Tak. Sarry again). Not to mention, finding my way around an airport and a ski resort. Not to mention needing to remember how to ski…..

Did I mention that I’m no good at any of these things? I basically followed one or other family member everywhere I went for a week.

More of that later. Let’s arrive in Norway first. My kids, having never flown before, are excited about everything, from the luggage carousels to being bought magazines. They are fascinated watching the planes taking off; that something so big can go in the sky. Fair enough; I’m forty and I feel the same. Then they are fascinated by how quickly houses zoom down into match-boxes. Then they’re watching the safety briefing and imagining what might happen if we crash. Then they are giggling far too loudly over their comics and then they are falling to sleep and then – at last – we’re bouncing down on the airport and it’s actually time to wake up.

Did I mention that I’m no good at skiing? I like it in principle – fresh air, exercise and all that. I love mountains. I even like lifts. I love it right until the moment that I’m standing at the top of a low-friction slope with slidey things under my feet. At this point, it starts to look less appealing.

Everything about Norway is as I expected, but subtler. So the incredible skies are as bewitching as on Frozen, but more gentle. The pine forests are just as steep, with snow clinging to firs at improbable angles. But they’re not quite as dense as I thought they would be (and the trolls must be shy). Public transport is gently silent (until our kids board, that is) but the atmosphere isn’t unfriendly. The prices – well, let’s say we cook for ourselves. By which I mean, other group-members cook and I try to make sure I wash up sometimes. The snow is nice; the sun is shining. The skiing is good.

Thanks to Hill End in Scotland, the children can ski. They drift into lessons with competent looks on their faces. My husband and his brother learned at that age. They set off in search of steep slopes. My parents in law aren’t even the oldest on the Nordic routes that are satisfying twenty-somethings. Meanwhile, my sister-in-law and I, who married into this crazy family, look at each other.

For those unfamiliar with this particular niche sport, the tracks are twinned grooves that go around the village like train-tracks, then off into the hills beyond. So you put one ski into each groove and slide your feet forward one at a time. The glide is all forwards, the skis being cleverly designed to stop each foot sliding backwards again. Off you go!

It’s nice on the flat. It’s really, really nice on the flat. Someone seems to have sprinkled glitter on the snow. The sky is blue; there isn’t the fog like in Scotland. It’s easier when you’re not quite so cold.

But of course, it’s not actually flat. You come to an (up-)hill. The sliding forwards-thing works up a small slope, but you do reach a gradient where your feet start to slide back down again, so you have to change your technique. At this point, you take your ski out of its groove and put it at a diagonal angle, digging the edges of each ski into the snow. Thus you waddle. The tracks look like fish-ribs, so-called “herring-bone” tracks. Having been to a gym three times in my life, I happen to know that cross-ski machines don’t involve this awkward waddle.

Still, you approach the top of the hill and you begin to feel elated, but now there’s a scary downhill slope ahead. There are grooves again and once you put your skis into them, they are going to slide quite fast to the bottom. Hopefully, you’ll slide down too. That is, if you stay balanced. It’s like being at the top of a run-away roller-coaster.

Sometimes, you can see that the hill’s not too steep and then levels out, but sometimes the grooves disappear round a corner and you don’t know how fast, or how far, they will go. Furthermore, sometimes at junctions, the special grooves suddenly stop, leaving the skier in free-fall, unable to steer. It seems inevitable that, at some point, we will land in a heap on the floor.

After a difficult couple of days involving lots of bravery and plenty of so-called fabric breaks (falling over, using your ski-clothes as friction to stop), we are both feeling slightly defeated. My sister-in-law, who is used to feeling competent at things, has a plan. She always has an idea, my sister-in-law, but this one is quite profound. ‘What we need,’ she says, ‘is to learn how to stop.’

Our Instructor, when we find him, is a young Dane called Hottler. He’s been living in the Faroes but they don’t have much snow there. He learned to ski last year, all in one season – one hundred days on snow. I like him. He chats; he smiles; he is sympathetic. He delivers the lesson we ask. We refresh snow-plough stops, snow-plough turns and even how to lift one leg from the groove to break.

The world, by the way, is split into two; non-skiers and folk who know how to snow-plough, which is a verb. When I was in the first group, I used to imagine that skiers shot downhill on parallel skis, but apparently not: that’s just for James Bond and our husbands. Beginners do these ungainly “snow-ploughs,” moving the front tips of your skis close together and having the backs of your skis far apart, like the business end of an arrow. You then lean on the inside edges of the skis, making a wide point of friction that slows your skis down. If, from a snow-plough position, you press harder with one inner-leg side of the ski, then you – the skier- swing sideways abruptly, a so-called ‘snow-plough turn.’

But when Nordic skiing, as you’ll remember, your feet are stuck in these grooves. Take one foot our and half snow-plough on the surface, and you don’t really turn, just slow down. Alternatively you can ignore the grooves and snow-plough down the middle without them. Thus, Hottler changes our lives as we know them.

The following morning, Norway suddenly looks like Scotland. They sky is grey and visibility poor. But we do our standard beginners route and this time, we’re much more in control. The next day, there is powder, which I always understood to be a good thing, but the groove-making beastie hadn’t been out, which made skiing a battle. Powder is actually very dry, like walking through polystyrene balls with planks on your feet. We come back early, tired, but you can’t have everything; we stop to watch our kids’ lesson in awe; they all look awesome to me.

Packing. I still don’t recognize half of my ski-stuff, or my bags. Someone has moved the thing on my doorknob that tells me which is my room. I realize, I have depended on my long-suffering sister in-law too much this week; she’s even written down what we’ve been doing today. She’s got me back to the chalet at the end of each session and sometimes out of the door.

Progress is slower than I thought it would be. I hypoed this morning. I think I must have double-dosed breakfast; I am missing my little routines from home. When there’s little alternative but pizza for tea at the airport, I somehow manage to dose my insulin wrong. Pizza is a notorious diabetic patch of black-ice; it’s because the fat makes the carbohydrate get absorbed far too slowly, causing hypos, making you want to over-eat, and then, half an hour later, leading to far-too-highs. I should have known better and slowed down the dose, or else stuck with salad. But it never seems as if it’s going to be too bad, before it happens.

And so. I have very high blood-sugars, a giant pizza-hangover. I’m waiting to catch an early-morning flight in a comparatively luxurious, very dry hotel. I don’t use hotels normally; excited as the kids, and I’ve used the free samples of soap in the bath. Yes, I think, I’ve had a frustrating hypo. I am probably not yet coping well enough outside my comfort zone. But I used to be clueless as this all the time; overall I’m getting better.

And despite the constant disorientation, I’m finally learning to ski.

/