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1000 Words a Weekday Challenge: Day 1

I don't actually know if I'll publish all of these, but the idea is to write 1,000 words per weekday over at least the next month. They won't all be here on my blog - they can be independent projects (books and the like) or more likely, basketball articles - but the idea is to get words on a document and see where they go.

Writing can be hard. It's hard to focus on an idea unless I have a real idea to start with. Just typing until something comes out feels like cheating or like it shouldn't count for anything, because I didn't go in with a purpose. But I guess writing is the purpose, so it can't be a failure.

Countless people will say that the trick to writing is to just start doing it. I'm hoping that's the case here, but so far it's not doing a whole lot.

In life news, I went skiing today. I grew up less than 5 miles from a ski "resort" and yet I never skied there. Ever. My brothers skied, my friends skied, and my dad even skied when my brothers were learning. But not me. I would go and watch them for the final half hour or so before they got picked up, but I never actually joined. I always thought it looked so cool, but I just never tried/took a lesson/showed enough interest that we actually got me to do it.

I would go to the "resort" sometimes though, as they had a tubing hill, and their tubing hill was fantastic. I mostly remember going with Graham, but sometimes bigger groups went, too. They had these tubes with rubber loop handles so you could loop your tubes together and have a 6-person mass of tubes flying down the hill at borderline unsafe speeds. No one ever got hurt (as far as I remember), but I do remember having enough speed to actually make it up over the embankment at the end of the run, ending up sliding through the parking lot on my tube. It was probably not safe.

Anyway, the first time I actually went skiing was in the Austrian Alps. It went about as well as you might expect for someone who had never skied before and decided to start in the Austrian Alps. I had fun, but I took a tumble toward a sign-post and basically scared my wife out of ever wanting to go skiing ever again. We tried cross-country a few times and it turns out I kind of liked doing that - and was comfortable on my feet - and it inspired me to try a lesson.

It was really fun! I went in assuming that I would be the worst skier they'd get today, but my instructor (Dante, who was great and who was probably 22 years old) admitted that he basically skipped the first few lessons once he saw that I could successfully go down the bunny-hill without threatening my life. Within 30 minutes I was going down a real, actual ski hill. I went down the two right-most slopes on this map. One's green, one's blue.

That's pretty good, right? I kept thinking about doing a different one, but my legs were tired and I kept convincing myself that it was much steeper than the ones I'd been going down to that point. Now that I'm looking at the trail map, that may not have been true at all. Oh well. There's always next time, I guess.

It definitely felt like I was embracing winter, which is an important thing to do when you live somewhere that gets snow/is cold for 4 months, like Ohio. I now just hope that Jenna and I can schedule a little getaway someplace and do some skiing together. Wouldn't that be fun? Peak n Peak, Holiday Valley, hell - Boston Mills/Brandywine would be fine by me at this point. I just want to see if I can be any good at this.

There are so many beautiful places in the world that are only accessible to skiers, and I want to see those places. That's as much the reason for doing this as any. I want to see and experience as much as I can in life, and this is a new way to do that. Furthermore, going from being completely unable to do something and getting to a point where you can do it is a wonderful feeling. I'm not there yet, but I'm not that far off. I did go down a blue slope at a tiny ski "resort" by myself, several times, on a not-crowded day.

I'm ready for the olympics.

So that's about it for today. I wrote 4-500 words about Russell Westbrook earlier this morning, so the 800 or so words in here is good enough for day one.

Wish me luck as I continue.

Oh, also, there's something beautiful about the solitude of skiing. I always suspected this, but even at a po-dunk ski place (when compared to actual mountains, I mean. It's more than sufficient for what it is) there's a really cool feeling of riding up the chairlift, looking around, and seeing the world from a new perspective. It's similar at that moment when you're atop the hill, looking down, about to start moving. No cars. Quiet. A new adventure in your face.

Life is cool.

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