[The Champ]

Since I last went downhill skiing.

That changed yesterday.

The backstory...

After my last ski outing in January of 1992, I was diagnosed with "cold induced asthma". Basically, doing anything physically exerting caused me great difficulties. I suffered with this for several years and as a result sold all my ski gear.

In the late 90's, I was diagnosed with diabetes, lost 75 pounds and my "cold induced asthma" went away. By this time, my wife was no longer interested in skiing, so I just didn't try doing it again at that time.

Over the last 15 years, I've gone through 4 major surgeries, that have somewhat limited what I can do at times.

Well, I've had the "itch" to see if I still could ski. I've been somewhat nervous about it and wanted "perfect" conditions - sunny day, reasonable temps and adequate snow. Well, all boxes were checked yesterday, so...

Yesterday I drove over to Wabasha, MN ("home" of the movie "Grumpy Old Men" - feel free to consider me one of the grumpy old men) to Coffee Mill Ski Area - the ski area with the most vertical (425') south of Duluth, MN (250 miles north of me) and rented some ski gear.

I'm happy to report that things went well. The first 2 runs I needed to stop multiple times to rest my legs and gain confidence. After that, I made 2 more runs on the Chippewa run before spending the rest of my time on the more difficult Nellie's Pass and Barnstomer runs.

I decided to quit after 2 hours because I was getting tempted to try the Black Diamond (most difficult) runs - Fall Line and Auggies Chute. I used to ski those runs back in the 80's and early 90's, but thought the better part of valor was to go home, see how my body feels in the morning and save something for my next time.

I'm happy to report that I never fell yesterday and that my body is fine this morning. I'm going shopping today to look at purchasing ski equipment because I just had a blast and am looking forward to skiing

Back in the day, I used to be on skis 7 days a week. I raced cross country in HS, so I trained M-F, raced on Saturday and Sunday was my day off from cross country skiing, so I went downhill skiing. I used to own 7 pairs of skis.

I turn 66 in 11 days and look forward to skiing for years to come!