A couple of hours ago I arrived back in Strømmen after spending ten days in Nesbyen. The first three days were an “Introduction Camp” with just the Australians where we learnt more Norwegian and the last 7 days were an intensive ski training camp with all of the exchange students in Norway.

I have very little ski training. Before I came to Norway I had only been skiing once……. for one week…………..when I was 11. I wouldn’t call myself an experienced skier in any way shape or form and I had a particularly poor track record with ski lifts. Coming into Winter Camp I had little idea of what to really expect. We had been told we’d learn to do both cross-country skiing and alpine skiing and that they were both quite different to each other.

Rather than bore you with a day-by-day explanation of what we did I will instead explain some of the life lessons I learnt whilst learning to ski:

1. The quicker you stop focusing on the negatives the easier everything becomes. The first time we went cross-country skiing as a group I fell exactly 2 times. I was quite impressed with myself to be honest. Later that day I fell a total of 10 times, 8 of which happened within the space of five minutes on what I have decided to call ‘Horror Hill’. On the first day I focused on the number of times I slipped or fell over and let me tell you it’s a lot more fun when you focus instead on how you are gradually better at getting back up again. It sounds cheesy (trust me I know) but when I stopped focusing on the slip ups and instead on the beauty of what I was doing (cross country skiing through some of the most picturesque places I’ve ever seen) it was a lot easier to enjoy.
2. Mindset is everything. I will make reference back to ‘Horror Hill’ now. I don’t know how many different bruises I got from that singular hill and believe me when I say if there had been a way to just transport straight to the end I would have taken it. But there wasn’t. After having my confidence ripped to shreds I still had to ski another 3-4kms. It is important to note that up until that point I had been loving the skiing. It was so different to anything I’d done before and it was just so cool. After my epic crash out I was hating it. It was painful and the source if my epic embarrassment. However, as I continued to ski, I tried to remind myself of why I had liked it so much in the first place. I forced myself to remember that amazing feeling I got when didn’t crash out on a hill the day before and was able to use the momentum to get up another massive hill. I reminded myself just how beautiful the scenery was and just how different it was to anything I’d experienced in Australia. I told myself that I liked cross country skiing even if I didn’t really believe it myself. I can now happily say I love cross country skiing. I fall over and over but I’ve learnt that if you can remain positive then you start to forget the falls and just enjoy the experience.
3. Sometimes you just need to laugh things off. Once again this lesson was learnt from my multiple falls and crashes. When I had my first few falls I was embarrassed. I don’t know who I was trying to impress but for some reason I felt as though I should be better. As the week went on I discovered that once you learn to laugh off a fall everything gets a lot easier. Really the whole idea of an Australian trying to cross country ski in Norway is sort of ridiculous and funny in a strange way. Of course I was going to fall but once I figured out how to appreciate the humour in it all it became a lot easier to get back up again. By the last day I found myself mentally pointing out the different places I had crashed out and laughing to myself, not because I was above falling now but because it was funny to think about how little those falls actually mattered.
4. You can control whether you are making good or bad memories. This was a hard lesson to learn. It was learnt from what I might call my most traumatic experience of the week. We did alpine skiing (downhill skiing) for two days. After the first day I was pretty happy with how I’d done and was relatively confident in my ability. I will now take this opportunity to point out that the way to the top of the slope was only via a ‘t bar lift’, I mentioned earlier my short experience with skiing and ski lifts, I don’t have a great track record with t bar lifts or any ski lift really. However on the first day I hadn’t had any disastrous experiences (mind you I had been accompanied by a rotarian on all t bar lift trips). So at the start of the second day I partnered with one of the other students to go on the lift. This T bar lift was very long (10-15 minutes?) and in some places also very steep. About halfway up the steepest section of the lift something went a bit wrong. I can’t be entirely sure who’s fault it was and looking back it doesn’t really matter but somehow we ended up stranded halfway up the ski lift, frantically trying to scramble out of the way.  It took a while for us to reach the side of the lift’s path and then even longer to try and cross through a sort of middle are with trees and knee deep snow. This would have been hard at the best of times, let alone with skis, ski boots and our poles. When we finally made it to the side of a slope I was completely exhausted and the worst was yet to come. Little did I know that this slope we now had to ski down happened to be the end part of the Black Run. The slope we were now faced with was meant for experienced skiers and certainly not for someone of my ability. Thankfully a rotarian joined us and my partner (being a much better skier than myself) quickly skied to the bottom. The same cannot be said for me. I don’t think I’ve ever been so scared in my life. This slope was not something I was capable of getting down without some sort of horrible experience along the way. In the end I did reach the bottom. It took a very long time but I managed to ski to the bottom ( with A LOT of help from a rotarian). But reaching the bottom wasn’t the biggest battle. I had been left traumatised by the experience, I was terrified of having to go through it all over again. The t bar lift became a thing of my nightmares. Getting back on the t bar lift was terrifying (despite the fact I was with a rotarian once again). I doubted everything I did and I had already sort of mentally banked the day as being a bad experience I had had at Winter Camp. However I got down the hill in one piece. I went again and crashed out on the t bar lift with the rotarian however it was quite early on so getting to the bottom was easy. I kept going up and down the mountain and on my final time I even took the t bar lift by myself. I was nervous and mentally sang through various songs from Dear Evan Hansen to distract myself but the feeling of reaching the top was unlike any other. It was whilst I was skiing down the slope the final time that I realised I’d been able to turn this negative experience into an incredibly happy one, into something I was proud of. I think all your proudest moments only feel so good because of the hard times you went through to get there. If I hadn’t tried again (a very easy option) that day would have forever been a bad memory. But I did try again and so now it’s something I’m incredibly proud of. I think it’s important to remember that it is up to you and only you to make good memories for yourself.
5. You won’t always be the best but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t try for a personal best. When you are in a group of 24 and some people have been in Norway for 6 months already it’s pretty clear that you won’t be the quickest, no where near it. As simple as it sounds it is, at times, hard to remember though. No one wants to be at the back of the group but there will always be someone who is the slowest. This wasn’t actually me (cue gasps of shock and surprise) but I definitely not near the front. So often we compare ourselves to other people to try and see improvements, somewhat wrongly. I’ll use the example of a maths test: your ranking might seem like the most important part but it should really be about seeing if you made fewer stupid mistakes than last time. When we went skiing I gradually learnt to stop thinking about how far ahead some people were and instead thought about how I was able to get up a particular hill quicker and how I had more control than the previous day.
6. There will be times where you have to respect your limits. This lesson (like many others) was learnt from ‘Horror Hill’ on my first day of cross country skiing. I’d been going great until this point and then in the space if five minutes I crashed out in pretty much every way possible (I’ve got the bruises to prove it). This hill sort of consisted of 4 smaller hills with a slightly flatter part between each of them. I crashed 7 times going down the first three. When I crashed for the 8th time at the top of the fourth I took a rotarian’s advice and walked to the bottom. One could say that I gave up but I think I understood my boundaries. My confidence was gone and if I had tried to keep going down the hill I would have only crashed more. Skiing is one of those sports that requires confidence, confidence in your skis to stay in the ski tracks, confidence in your pole to slow you enough and confidence in yourself to remain in control. If you don’t have one of those then you don’t really have a shot. When I reached the bottom of the hill I put my skis back on. When we came across the next hill (considerably smaller) it was hard to put any confidence in myself but I managed.
7. Make yourself proud.  The last 10 days have been amazing. I have learnt so much about skiing and about myself however one thing stands out. If you try and I mean really try you are capable of most things within reason. At the start of the week I had little knowledge or experience with skiing. At the end of the week I received the prize for ‘Most Improved”. It was great to be recognised but the best reward I received for my efforts this week was by far the pride I felt in myself. I wasn’t the best and I fell a lot but I knew I was trying hard and so when things started to improve I knew I had earned it. This last week has been full of moments that I am proud of. There were ups and downs but at the end of the day I learnt an awful lot about myself and just what I can do.

I won’t be representing Australia at the next Winter Olympics but I’ve learned to love skiing and the life lessons that it teaches you.

Until next time,

Alicia