Confessions of a racer dad
Posted by Zach Johns on Thursday, January 31, 2013 Under: Downhill ski racing
It
was a gorgeous day at Giants Ridge. The sun was shining, the air was
crisp, and there was even a light dusting of powder gracing the hill.
It was one of those days just meant for making turns.
Yet there I was. Standing on the side of the hill - wearing REGULAR BOOTS on my feet - holding a clipboard like some backup quarterback. “Thwack, thwack, thwack,” the next skier came charging down the course, smacking the gates aside. I paid close attention, making sure they were turning where they were supposed to.
Suddenly, I heard someone make a hard turn and come to a stop behind me.
“I can’t believe my eyes! Just can’t believe my eyes!!!”
It was “Smooth Rider” the de facto leader of the Giants Ridge Freeskiers - a group of hard skiing renegades who are the hill’s heart and soul - yet fiercely against any type of organized skiing.
“I know … I know …” I said, my head hanging. “I can’t believe I’m doing this either…”
“It’s ok,” said Smooth Rider. “It’ll be good for him. ‘Can’t say the same for you!” He laughed and pushed off making turns through the powder.
Well, he was partly right. My son Nick joining the Hibbing High School Alpine Skiing Team was good for him. Very good, in fact, as he learns a whole new aspect to skiing. But it has proven good for me, too - in ways I could have never imagined.
Now, I am the last person you would possibly expect to have a racer kid. I know that might be hard to believe since I ski so much, but growing-up, I couldn’t stand racers. I mean, they were so annoying. They skied in big packs at Trollhaugen, causing long lift lines, always clad in their matching white helmets which made them look like stormtroopers from Star Wars. In fact, whenever the racers would start setting-up a course, one of my friends would come flying up to warn us, “The storm troopers are building a new Death Star on the far side of Summit!”
I must admit, however, that it really was just the local kid racers that annoyed me. The Olympic racers, especially the down hillers, were super-rad heroes! My first ski hero, in fact, was Pirmin Zurbriggen, the Swiss skier who won the gold in the downhill at the 1988 Winter Olympics in Calgary. Zurbriggen just flew - the speed, the air, it was just amazing!!!! He was the reason that my second pair of skis were Kastles. Of course, they weren’t racing skis - they were mogul skis! And in mogul skiing, I found a type of competitive skiing I could really embrace.
To me the most exciting event in the whole Olympics was, and still is, freestyle moguls! I think that’s because unlike a downhill course, where there are no Midwestern hills big enough, or freestyle aerials which needed a special kid of jump, moguls were something we could ski every single day. They were accessible to the masses - and fun as hell!
So in my 28 years of skiing, I have only participated in one competitive skiing event. Once during my college years, Spirit Mountain decided to have a mogul contest during their Spring Carnival. It was held on Blue Ruin, and was judged like any other bump contest - on speed, turns and air. Since I skied those bumps eight hours a day, EVERY DAY, I thought I would sign-up. Moguls were my element!
It was a dual format with the highest score in each heat advancing in the tournament. The first round I pounded down my line with my opponent keeping up fairly well. I threw a daffy off the first air and a backscratcher off the second. Of course those tricks would be laughed at by today’s mogul competitors, but they were pretty rad back then (to me, anyway). I finished just ahead of my opponent and the judges awarded me the victory. Sweet!
Before the second round began, I went off to ski some other runs and by the time I came back the round had ended with me a no-show! And so my competitive skiing career ended. Oh well, those other guys were throwing helicopters so I probably would have lost, anyway!
My post-collegiate skiing career took me to Giants Ridge where they are kind of “race crazy.” In January it seems like there is a race nearly every other day and in doing so they close-off the top part of Helsinki which accesses many of my favorite lines. And speaking of lines, you should see the lift lines when 100 racers come back out after lunch - always to the Helsinki chair, pretty-much the only chair I care to ride.
But alas, having kids tends to change things. Both my boys have grown-up on skis and now that Nick entered junior high I thought that him joining the high school racing team might not be a bad idea. In fact, most of history’s greatest freeskiers from Doug Coombs, to Shane McConkey to Seth Morrison, all have a racing background. Racing technique would be a good foundation to build upon.
At first, Nick wasn’t too big on the idea. “It would cut into my freeskiing time,” he complained. He wanted to focus on skiing moguls and powder and steeps and learning new tricks in the terrain park. Try as I might, I could not convince him that being a racer might be a good idea.
Then one day we were camping with my college buddy Aaron who is a great skier and ski patroller at Welch Village. Nick looks up to him a lot. As we were sitting by the campfire one evening the subject of racing was brought up. Nick again expressed his desire to focus on freeskiing. Then Aaron casually mentioned it would help his skiing a lot and within two seconds Nick had changed his mind!
Of course, when your parents say it …
So there I was, at the Spirit Mountain ski swap in October, buying Nick a new helmet with those “Gary Anderson-style” facemasks, poles with shields to protect his knuckles from hitting the bamboo, and even one of those skin-tight speed suits! He’s also now traveling with two pairs of skis in the Thule box at all times - his slalom skis and his twin-tip freestyle/powder skis. Yeah, ski racing is up there with hockey as the most expensive high school sport out there. I guess I’ll be riding the same pair of skis until the boys are in college! Or longer…
Well, now Nick is a ski racer. And guess what? He’s loving it! The kids on the team are great and instead of going to some other’s school’s smelly gym for away meets, they get to visit other ski hills like Lutsen, Spirit or Mont Du Lac! How awesome is that!?
His results have been so-so, but he’s just an eighth grader, and since we have always avoided skiing ice like the plague, he is still getting used to the icy course. He seems to ski relaxed, not trying to push it too hard citing the ice. He really needs to learn how to balance speed with control - how to push the speed to the maximum limit without crashing. He’ll learn…
He’ll learn, just like I’ve learned. I’ve learned that high school ski racing is a wicked cool sport. And the kids who ski and the parents who support them are awesome. It takes a lot of help to put-on a ski race - and I am more than happy to stand there on the side of the hill on a powder day so these kids can race.
I can honestly say that I am proud to be the dad of a ski racer. Of course, my proudest moment came last weekend, just before the race started. Jackson and I were riding up the lift as the first racers were in the starting gate. As I crested the top of Helsinki I saw Nick leading his buddy Blake into a steep patch of untracked powder between the trees. I had planned on hitting that exact same patch on the next run!
Sure he’s a racer, but he’ll still snag first tracks whenever he can! That’s my boy!!!
Yet there I was. Standing on the side of the hill - wearing REGULAR BOOTS on my feet - holding a clipboard like some backup quarterback. “Thwack, thwack, thwack,” the next skier came charging down the course, smacking the gates aside. I paid close attention, making sure they were turning where they were supposed to.
Suddenly, I heard someone make a hard turn and come to a stop behind me.
“I can’t believe my eyes! Just can’t believe my eyes!!!”
It was “Smooth Rider” the de facto leader of the Giants Ridge Freeskiers - a group of hard skiing renegades who are the hill’s heart and soul - yet fiercely against any type of organized skiing.
“I know … I know …” I said, my head hanging. “I can’t believe I’m doing this either…”
“It’s ok,” said Smooth Rider. “It’ll be good for him. ‘Can’t say the same for you!” He laughed and pushed off making turns through the powder.
Well, he was partly right. My son Nick joining the Hibbing High School Alpine Skiing Team was good for him. Very good, in fact, as he learns a whole new aspect to skiing. But it has proven good for me, too - in ways I could have never imagined.
Now, I am the last person you would possibly expect to have a racer kid. I know that might be hard to believe since I ski so much, but growing-up, I couldn’t stand racers. I mean, they were so annoying. They skied in big packs at Trollhaugen, causing long lift lines, always clad in their matching white helmets which made them look like stormtroopers from Star Wars. In fact, whenever the racers would start setting-up a course, one of my friends would come flying up to warn us, “The storm troopers are building a new Death Star on the far side of Summit!”
I must admit, however, that it really was just the local kid racers that annoyed me. The Olympic racers, especially the down hillers, were super-rad heroes! My first ski hero, in fact, was Pirmin Zurbriggen, the Swiss skier who won the gold in the downhill at the 1988 Winter Olympics in Calgary. Zurbriggen just flew - the speed, the air, it was just amazing!!!! He was the reason that my second pair of skis were Kastles. Of course, they weren’t racing skis - they were mogul skis! And in mogul skiing, I found a type of competitive skiing I could really embrace.
To me the most exciting event in the whole Olympics was, and still is, freestyle moguls! I think that’s because unlike a downhill course, where there are no Midwestern hills big enough, or freestyle aerials which needed a special kid of jump, moguls were something we could ski every single day. They were accessible to the masses - and fun as hell!
So in my 28 years of skiing, I have only participated in one competitive skiing event. Once during my college years, Spirit Mountain decided to have a mogul contest during their Spring Carnival. It was held on Blue Ruin, and was judged like any other bump contest - on speed, turns and air. Since I skied those bumps eight hours a day, EVERY DAY, I thought I would sign-up. Moguls were my element!
It was a dual format with the highest score in each heat advancing in the tournament. The first round I pounded down my line with my opponent keeping up fairly well. I threw a daffy off the first air and a backscratcher off the second. Of course those tricks would be laughed at by today’s mogul competitors, but they were pretty rad back then (to me, anyway). I finished just ahead of my opponent and the judges awarded me the victory. Sweet!
Before the second round began, I went off to ski some other runs and by the time I came back the round had ended with me a no-show! And so my competitive skiing career ended. Oh well, those other guys were throwing helicopters so I probably would have lost, anyway!
My post-collegiate skiing career took me to Giants Ridge where they are kind of “race crazy.” In January it seems like there is a race nearly every other day and in doing so they close-off the top part of Helsinki which accesses many of my favorite lines. And speaking of lines, you should see the lift lines when 100 racers come back out after lunch - always to the Helsinki chair, pretty-much the only chair I care to ride.
But alas, having kids tends to change things. Both my boys have grown-up on skis and now that Nick entered junior high I thought that him joining the high school racing team might not be a bad idea. In fact, most of history’s greatest freeskiers from Doug Coombs, to Shane McConkey to Seth Morrison, all have a racing background. Racing technique would be a good foundation to build upon.
At first, Nick wasn’t too big on the idea. “It would cut into my freeskiing time,” he complained. He wanted to focus on skiing moguls and powder and steeps and learning new tricks in the terrain park. Try as I might, I could not convince him that being a racer might be a good idea.
Then one day we were camping with my college buddy Aaron who is a great skier and ski patroller at Welch Village. Nick looks up to him a lot. As we were sitting by the campfire one evening the subject of racing was brought up. Nick again expressed his desire to focus on freeskiing. Then Aaron casually mentioned it would help his skiing a lot and within two seconds Nick had changed his mind!
Of course, when your parents say it …
So there I was, at the Spirit Mountain ski swap in October, buying Nick a new helmet with those “Gary Anderson-style” facemasks, poles with shields to protect his knuckles from hitting the bamboo, and even one of those skin-tight speed suits! He’s also now traveling with two pairs of skis in the Thule box at all times - his slalom skis and his twin-tip freestyle/powder skis. Yeah, ski racing is up there with hockey as the most expensive high school sport out there. I guess I’ll be riding the same pair of skis until the boys are in college! Or longer…
Well, now Nick is a ski racer. And guess what? He’s loving it! The kids on the team are great and instead of going to some other’s school’s smelly gym for away meets, they get to visit other ski hills like Lutsen, Spirit or Mont Du Lac! How awesome is that!?
His results have been so-so, but he’s just an eighth grader, and since we have always avoided skiing ice like the plague, he is still getting used to the icy course. He seems to ski relaxed, not trying to push it too hard citing the ice. He really needs to learn how to balance speed with control - how to push the speed to the maximum limit without crashing. He’ll learn…
He’ll learn, just like I’ve learned. I’ve learned that high school ski racing is a wicked cool sport. And the kids who ski and the parents who support them are awesome. It takes a lot of help to put-on a ski race - and I am more than happy to stand there on the side of the hill on a powder day so these kids can race.
I can honestly say that I am proud to be the dad of a ski racer. Of course, my proudest moment came last weekend, just before the race started. Jackson and I were riding up the lift as the first racers were in the starting gate. As I crested the top of Helsinki I saw Nick leading his buddy Blake into a steep patch of untracked powder between the trees. I had planned on hitting that exact same patch on the next run!
Sure he’s a racer, but he’ll still snag first tracks whenever he can! That’s my boy!!!
In : Downhill ski racing
Tags: skiing downhill racing race giants ridge minnesota hibbing alpine team pirmin zurbriggen olympics
Zach Johns is an alpine skier, backpacker, paddler and all-around nature lover who lives on Minnesota‘s Iron Range. Originally from Osceola, Wis., Johns attended the University of Minnesota-Duluth so he could ski every day and be close to the trails of his beloved North Shore. There, he earned a degree in Communication and was editor of the student newspaper. However, the real education he gained at UMD was in honing his outdoor skills. He took courses in subjects such as backpacking, winter camping, rock climbing and canoe tripping. By the time he graduated, that was all he wanted to do. In January of 1997, he moved to the Range where he met a group of die-hard skiers dedicated to making turns at Giants Ridge every single day of the winter (when they weren’t out skiing the big mountains of the west.) Throughout the late nineties he built a very impressive ski resume, taking several trips to Utah, Montana, Wyoming, California, British Columbia and Alaska. During the off-season, he took to the hiking trails. In 1997, he hiked the entire Superior Hiking Trail during the single season (what had been completed until that time) and in following years, took trips to Yosemite, Glacier and the Grand Canyon. He also made two attempts to climb King’s Peak, the highest mountain in Utah, but failed to summit both times. In 1999, he attempted the infamous 43-mile Kekekabic Trail through the heart of the BWCA and limped out after only ten miles with a hernia. He did finally complete the Kek in 2005, during one of the hottest weeks on record. Besides hiking, he also continued dabbling with paddling, making several canoe trips to the BWCA and became an enthusiastic (yet very novice) whitewater kayaker. He is now a father of two sons, Nick and Jackson, who accompany their father on nearly all his adventures. Both were skiing fairly soon after they could stand and from 2006-2011, the three hiked in every state park in Minnesota, 195 miles of hiking in 65 parks. Since becoming a dad, Johns has suddenly realized that you can’t just be out there skiing, hiking, paddling, etc. without also working to protect the very things you love. With that in mind, he founded an adventure club at work to get co-workers outside who might not otherwise be inspired to go. The club has gone on hiking, paddling, winter camping and cycling trips and annually go on a trash pick-up hike to celebrate Earth Day. He believes that once you get people out into beautiful wild places, the more likely they will be to protect them. He has also done a lot of volunteer work for the Superior Hiking Trail Association including adopting a backcountry campsite which he and the boys maintain twice a year. It is of extreme importance, he believes, to introduce children to the outdoors early. Not only is it good for them, but they will be the ones protecting these places once we are gone. Future plans? There are a few local goals to check-off including hiking the Border Route Trail in the BWCA and Isle Royale. Mostly, it’s just to take the boys hiking and camping in more of our national parks, skiing the big western mountains, and more of their usual seasonal cycle: Giants Ridge in the winter, Superior’s North Shore in the spring, South Shore in the summer and back to the North Shore in the fall.
