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Granite peak, Wausau Wisconsin. The start of my skiing journey. Skiing runs deep in my family, and my dad decided at the ripe old age of 6 it was time to get me on the hill. You have probably heard the anaology before for learning how to ski, Pizza-french fry. This is in reference to changing between pointing your skis straight, then angling them inward to regulate your speed. It's a perfect example of the effectiveness of imagery in enhancing the consolidation of memories, which in this case is the techniques vital to skiing. "Pizza, french fry, pizza french fry" I continued to verbalize to myself as I went down the mountain. I was in the midst of the cognitive stage of learning, where every brain cell I had was focused on skiing and I had to talk myself through every step. Man was it rough too. The first half of the day involved a lot of falling, face planting, and strategy changing. However, I preserved through, and by the end of the day I was getting the hang of it. I was even able get some solid turns in so I didn't just rely on angling my skis to slow down. Being able to turn opens the door to vastly improving your skiing ability. By the end of the day I saw huge improvements with every run. For the next few years, my ski abilities sky rocketed. I hit the associative stage and dropped my verbal cues and was able to detect errors when I made a poor turn and would learn from it. Today I find myself in the Autonomous stage, where skiing is like walking. I'll listen to music when I ski and even sing along. It doesn't take much thought, and more than once I've been able to correct mistakes I make mid turn and save myself from hitting a rock and going face first into the snow. I have reached the plateau that you'll find at the top of an S-shaped performance curve that is associated with complex tasks like skiing. Learning new tricks like 360s, and skiing through trees and deep snow out west take a long time to perfect, just like learning my first turns. But I love every second of it, and I can't wait for every challenge that faces me on the mountain.

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"Never take the same run twice." Those were the words of my guru ski uncle that have always stuck in my head. This sense of adventure is so important to skiing, mostly because it's the best way to improve your skills. Perfect ski runs that hold great snow, terrain, and seem perfect are few and far between, so it's important for the other 90 percent of your runs to always be changing the conditions to improve your practice variability and keep your ski skills up. Practice variability is the variety of movement and context characteristics a person experiences when practicing a skill. Increasing your level of practice variability has been shown to improve a subject's ability in that skill in studies done by Shea and Kohl. This is what my uncle was always referring to. He always encouraged randomizing the ski conditions you will encounter by switching up runs, as this is much more effective than blocking your runs with the same ones over and over again.  It may be frustrating to switch between the long looping turns on wide open faces with quick, sharp turns between trees. Being a perfectionist, I would rather stay on one run and master it rather than running all over the mountain and falling on my face taking each run for the first time. However, I know this will increase my skills tremendously, and when the time comes for me to navigate steep runs full of perfect snow and challenging terrain, I'll be up to the task thanks to my practice techniques.

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Not gonna lie, I really wanted an excuse to post this video. The video below is a GoPro of me backcountry skiing in Montana two years ago, and to this day it's one of the coolest things I've done. My favorite part about it is we start up in beautiful blue skies, and as we ski down the mountain we descend into the clouds. While the cloud cover didn't end up impairing my vision that much, it's common when skiing in high elevation to get stuck in fog that kills your visibility. With white snow, grey fog, and tinted goggles, this many times leads to "vertigo." Vertigo is caused by direct conflict between your visual sensory information and Proprioception. Proprioception is your bodies way of understanding its general spatial location during movement. While skiing your joints are moving, your leg muscles are working like crazy, your proprioceptors are all telling your brain you're moving. However, your visual feedback isn't detecting any movement in its visual field. It just sees white. Vertigo will actually make people get physically sick, I've seen it knock some skiers out. But there are ways to combat it. By taking your goggles off and focusing on the snow right in front of you, you're able to at least see some movement and not have the conflicting signals being sent to your brain. But you really have to rely on your proprioceptic feedback to ski. It really makes you feel like you're one with the mountain(cheesy sounding but true). When I was a young buck first learning how to ski, this loss of visual feedback would have made me fall like a toddler in a moving room. But now, I know to focus on the windspeed around me to gauge my speed, and feeling the bumps underneath my skis to understand the terrain and density of the snow I'm in. Oh, and I also pray there isn't a tree or cliff coming up in front of me. But it can be fun. Responding to the changes in terrain that you feel is a key part of skiing, so vertigo situations really help you hone your proprioceptic skills.

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Beautiful blue bird day skiing backcountry, all the tracks you see were ours. The snow was untouched and as soft as can be, it could not have been a better day.

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They call it Hellroaring. The backside of Whitefish mountain in Montana, easily some of the hardest skiing I've ever done. It's steep, full of giant bumps, cluttered with trees, and icy snow. There's a lot going on when you're skiing down it. One of the first times I took a run down it I nearly killed myself, and you can attribute that to the bottle neck theory. The bottle neck theory states that we have a limited fixed attention capacity, and that somewhere in our information processing line, we hit a "bottleneck" where only one piece of information can be processed at a time. This leads to slower reaction times when processing a lot of information. Let's think about Hellroaring for a minute. There's a lot of information to process there as a skier between the bumps, ice and trees. And the first time I went down Hellroaring I was not ready for it. I came around a corner that was very icy, so I had to focus on making sure I turned at just the right angle so my skies stayed under me. Then there was also a small drop-off coming up, so I had to make sure I didn't turn too much and send myself off of that. By the time I finally had a chance to look at what laid beyond me after that first turn, it was too late. I was already half way up a giant bump in the run. I was thrown into the air like a slingshot directly into a tree. I hit the tree so hard I cracked it right up the middle, and my goggles implanted into my head and gave me two black eyes. If I had not been wearing a helmet, I would have been done for. Luckily I managed to escape with only some cuts and bruises, as well as a nasty headache. I learned from then on to take it slow in situations like that, so you can make sure you have enough time to adequately process the information in your surroundings and respond accordingly.

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So what does a skier do when the snow melts? For me, wake boarding is the answer. Now wake boarding may seem like a pretty different hobby from skiing. Wakebaording involves being pulled by a rope on water, and you're on a board that represents a snowboard more than skis. But there are a surprising amount of shared component parts in the two skills. When there are shared components between two skills, transfer can occur. Transfer is the gain of proficiency in a skill as the result of practice in another. So what are some of the shared components? First and foremost, both skills require great balance. In order to turn in either instance, you must use the edges of your skis/board and it takes high levels of coordination in your knees and feet to execute these movements. The use of your visual and proprioceptual senses is just as important in wakeboarding as it is in skiing. Observing wave size with your eyes and your legs is important. When going over rougher water you have to take a lower stance on your board, so when I feel rough water below me I instantly change my stance to compensate. Because of these similarities, I've successfully been able to transfer my time skiing to wake boarding. I know this because since moving to college from my lake house back home, my chances to wakeboard are minimal. However, despite taking years off from wake boarding, when I recently went again I found myself even more comfortable on the board. It was clear the skills I learned from my yearly ski trips improved my abilities on the water as well.