When I haven’t slept well the night before, I tend to get emotional over almost anything. I heard a song and wept once in the car on the way up to the mountain. I wept twice more while skiing: once on the lift when I saw a blackbird playing in the wind and again on my final run of the day.
At Keystone they have two very long mogul runs. I can arrive at the mountain by noon or even one o’ clock and take those two runs the rest of the day and come home completely exhausted, as if I had skied from early morning until midnight.
Today, I skied extra hard, but, in spite of the fatigue, I was having a good day. I was so in the zone during my last run that I decided not to stop and rest a quarter of the way down as I normally do, and I kept going until I reached the midway curve. Catching my breath, I sat down in the snow and waited for my heart rate to calm. When it did, I was able to focus on the view: a clear sky and miles and miles and miles of mountain and snow-frosted pines. It looked like mercy.
