SKIING : There Are Lessons to Be Learned Early On

You think everything is ready for your first ski trip. Dr. George has given his blessings to the snow conditions at Big Bear. You have purchased skis, boots and bunny-rabbit ear muffs, spending more money on equipment than the U.S. Olympic team. You have also acquired enough Gore-Tex and goose down to prevent hypothermia and, even more important, to make the right kind of fashion statement on the ski lodge social scene. And you even took the trouble to visit your local tanning center for one of those microwave jobs that look so good against a backdrop of white snow and Beautiful People.

But just before you bolt the skis to the roof of your car and take off for a three-day packaged weekend, you realize you’ve forgotten something.

You never learned to ski.

When you get to the mountains, you will immediately be tempted to try out your new equipment. But it is highly recommended that you don’t attempt to swivel across the snow like Suzy Chapstick until you take a ski lesson. Learn from the mistakes of a reporter (who prefers not to be named): You just can’t strap on a pair of skis and fly down the slopes without any prior experience. People who think they are smarter than the mountain usually become fast friends with surgeons--orthopedic and plastic.

The unidentified reporter had never been skiing and was going to write an article on his experiences at a small ski lodge in Galena, Ill., a place Robert Redford wouldn’t be seen dead in.

With his typewriter in one hand and his wife in the other, the reporter checked in after dark and soon discovered the tropical decor in the bar and a very strange room policy. In the middle of the night, the couple was awakened by the hotel manager and informed that they now had roommates--a couple of guys from Gary, Ind., whose reservations had been lost.

The next morning, even Galena looked like Steamboat Springs, and the reporter was eager to get going. He rented skis and scheduled his first lesson, but then made a fatal error: He walked over to the top of the bunny hill to kill some time.

The bunny hill is what they call the easiest course on the mountain. It is like a football field on a slant, safe for heart patients and small children. But as the reporter stood there, he just knew he could ski down that bunny slope. No lesson. No sweat. So he pushed off and defied the mountain.

Racing downhill at maybe 1 m.p.h., he suddenly realized that the control he had enjoyed on dry land was dangerously absent on snow. His skis were beginning to go in opposite directions and his legs were spreading like a wishbone. He slowly toppled, skis crossed like a giant X. His right leg began to bend the wrong way. Knee ligaments stretched. Ouch. He lay on his back like a snow angel, his ski career finished before he got halfway down the bunny hill.

A girl hot-dogged past him, deftly avoiding his body. She was about 4 years old and had been skiing for maybe five minutes in her life. But she had taken a lesson.

Horror stories are not uncommon in skiing. It is a sport whose popularity and appeal are derived from the exhilaration of moving in the fast lane. But danger always skis at your side, a constant companion regardless of how careful you are. Lessons are one way of developing the skills necessary to protect yourself on the slopes. Conditioning--even if you’re an experienced skier--is also important.

“It takes time to learn to ski, but a lot of people have this misconception that it’s easy,” said Dave Behle, a ski instructor. “They try to tackle things they shouldn’t and wind up being taken down the hill on those ski patrol sleds.”

Behle teaches skiing inside the Ski & Sports West shop in Granada Hills. Thanks to an Anaheim inventor named Tom Talmon, it is possible to learn skiing techniques without getting cold or going to a ski lodge in Galena, Ill. In the late 1960s, Talmon came up with an indoor ski deck to train freestyle skiers. He built his first deck at Ski & Sports West. There are three others in Southern California, more than 40 around the country.

Basically, the deck works like a moving sidewalk at an airport. A 23-foot-long tilted floor is covered with high-grade commercial carpeting. A 20-horsepower motor rolls the carpeting uphill as fast as 10 m.p.h. When the skier steps on the carpet, he gets the same sensation and needs the same reactions as if he were skiing downhill on snow. If he falls, he gets rug burns instead of frostbite.

“You must be technically correct to ski here,” said Craig Reynolds, owner of the shop. “The deck allows us to take an individual and in a very short amount of time teach him to ski. One hour on this is equal to almost a full day on the mountain. We’ve had students who’ve gone to a resort and skied their first time out.”

A mountain is different from a carpet, of course. A carpet doesn’t have bumps, crevices or trees. It would be imprudent to think that once you mastered the carpet you owned the mountain.

“For the average person, by the fourth time you’ve skied you start to feel comfortable,” Behle said. “By then, you’ve seen the mountain, you’ve been on a lift, you’ve watched the other skiers and your confidence builds.”

It will take more than a lesson to make you feel comfortable on the slopes. If you’re not in shape, even if you do know how to ski, you are probably going to have an experience that is unenjoyable as well as potentially hazardous. And injuries on skis are as much fun as falling off your bike in the middle of Reseda Boulevard.

“After two or three runs, you become very fatigued, and if you push yourself further you become susceptible to injury and some very sore muscles the next day,” said Vanet Yapp, a physical therapist and athletic trainer at Cal State Northridge. “The rule of thumb is, if you’re wondering if you should take that last run, don’t. Accidents happen when you’re tired.”

A skier most of her life, Yapp has seen a lot of skiing injuries, both on the job and on the mountain. Ankles were once the most injured part of the body, she said, “but boots today are like a cast for the ankle, so the ankle isn’t a problem anymore.” The problem today is the knee. She said the medial collateral and anterior cruciate ligaments are particularly vulnerable because the skier does a lot of twisting and puts a lot of weight on his knees.

“The stress that used to go to the ankle now goes to the knee,” Yapp said.

The reporter strained his medial collateral ligament in the spill at Galena and needed extensive rehabilitation to enable him to visit discos again. He never again attempted skiing, thereby saving his body from other common skiing injuries, like shoulder separations and a particularly wicked injury called “gamekeeper’s thumb.”

Gamekeeper’s thumb occurs when you fall on your pole and your thumb gets caught in the loop. Ouch. No flicking the Bic for a long while.

“You usually tear the medial collateral ligament,” Yapp said, “and it has to be surgically repaired.”

Even for veteran skiers, spills are almost impossible to avoid, but the better your physical condition, the more you are resilient and flexible.

“There are four things you really need for skiing,” Yapp said. “Flexibility, strength, endurance and coordination. If you have strength, you can power yourself out of a dangerous situation. If you have flexibility, chances are your shoulder, for example, won’t dislocate if it’s stretched. If you have endurance, you won’t get fatigued as easily.

“As for coordination, I’ve seen people who have a hard time putting one foot in front of the other when they’re running. It’s not going to be any easier for them on skis. For those people, I suggest they try cross-country skiing. It doesn’t take as much coordination, but it does require a lot of endurance.”

The best way to get in shape for skiing, Yapp said, is to do aerobic exercises, such as bicycling and running. The quadriceps, or thigh muscles, “take a lot of punishment” in skiing, she said, recommending wall slides to strengthen them. These are not the same as deep-knee bends, which are now considered harmful by the American Medical Assn.

“The correct way to do a wall slide is to put your back against a wall, bend your knees down to a 45-degree angle and hold it for 10 to 15 seconds,” she said. “Try to increase the time and the reps.”

Yapp also believes that quads, hamstrings, calves, shoulders and arms should be stretched before you step out the door in the morning. Skiers also should warm up and cool down to prevent muscle pulls and to remain flexible during those long hours outdoors. Because muscles tighten quickly in cold weather, she said, while you’re waiting for your turn down the hill, stretch out your legs and back by placing your poles in front of you and leaning toward them. Once you graduate to difficult slopes, you should still warm up and cool down on an easy course.

“Accidents usually happen on the first run of the day or the last few,” she said.

And whatever you do, don’t wear blue jeans.

“When they get wet,” she said, “your body heat escapes through them.”

Even worse, they’re definitely out of it in the ski lodge.