I. Am. Sore.

I went skiing at Cypress Mountain yesterday, the first time I’ve gone skiing in nearly ten years. And today, I am in a world of pain. Alright, “world” might be an exaggeration, but I’m at least in a small island, possibly a Pacific continent which I won’t name here, of pain. I don’t understand how ten years passed since last I went skiing. I guess with going to university and travelling, it got lost along the way.

I’d forgotten how much I enjoyed skiing. As a kid I joked about the almost pathological addiction of my father to skiing. He’d wake me up on Saturday winter mornings at an absurd hour, a gleeful grin on his face:

There’s fresh powder on the hills, let’s GO!

I think he enjoyed skiing just to spite me and get me out of bed early on the weekends. It was a 20-minute drive from our house to Kimberley Ski Resort, located in the sleepy town where my father worked at the local hospital. The fact that the hospital was only five minutes from the ski hill only fed his addiction, allowing a determined skier to hit the hill several times in the same work day: before work, at lunch, after work, and after dinner. And my father was a determined skier.

Mostly, I remember riding the chair lift with him, which he jokingly reminded me counted as “quality father-son time”. It was as if he were attempting to prod some omnipotent sky-bound referee to keep an accurate score.

I missed that yesterday.