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Look at me on my mo-mo-mo-mo-monoski by Greg Dobbs No, this isn’t set to music. And no, I’m not stuttering. That staccato beat is the sound I make on the bumps, as I turn-turn-turn-turn-turn on my monoski .... leaving a lot of younger skiers behind!
Besides being a second youth, what is a monoski? Well, just picture two skis glued together. I wear ski boots, I plant poles, my two feet stand in bindings side by side (nearly touching, to keep the ski as narrow as possible). They are non-release bindings, by the way; you really don’t want one foot coming out while the other one is still whistling down the hill. In short, a monoski looks like a snowboard, but it isn’t. A snowboard you ride. A monoski ... you ski! The biggest difference from normal skis: you don’t have an uphill edge to your downhill ski ... because you don’t have a downhill ski! Faithful to the laws of physics, the monoski has just one edge on each side -- just one edge to dig into the fall line of the hill. You have to drive with your knees and kick your turns. And oh yeah, you can’t snowplow. Don’t even try. Knees, of course, are the curse of all of us in our fifties. We have literally run them into the ground. I myself have painfully torn ligaments in them both ... in skiing accidents, skiing the old-fashioned way. I’m not an orthopedist, so I can’t really explain why, but take my word for it: skiing the monoski doesn’t hurt my knees at all. I think there’s a simple reason: they’re always in sync. They have to be. Side by side in non-release bindings, they have no choice. Maybe the only downside for a middle-aged monoskier is that the darned thing stands stone still on flat surfaces, like catwalks, and lift lines. What this means is, you need lots of help from your upper body, which for me is not what it used to be. Why should it? One of the rewards of middle age is having two strong strapping sons to haul heavy boxes to the attic and carry the suitcases on family trips. The upside is, I feel "cool" on my monoski. I didn’t know I would when I started six years ago, but I’m reminded of it every time I’m skiing under a chair lift and someone shouts down "Hey, monoman, lookin’ good!" I can’t think of any other time in my fifties when anyone thought I was "lookin’ good!" Or, when I get in a lift line and little kids ask, "Is that hard?" Sometimes I’m honest and say no. Sometimes though, I try to appear as a master of understatement with something like, "Well, not if you’re a pretty good skier when you start." By the way, I wasn’t. The best thing about the monoski is that the places I like to go -- the places where the monoski works the best -- are steep and bumpy slopes where I’m lucky to see anyone much more than half my age. Of course that’s a drawback too; fifty-something friends may want to ski with me, but do I really want to ski with them?!? |
Skiing
on this monoski is like having a second youth. I do things I couldn’t do
the first time around. In fact being 53, I do things I’d never do (and
never did) on two plain ol’ alpine skis. The bumpier, the better. The
steeper, the better. The more extreme, the better. Double-black
diamonds, here I am!!!