Vertical excess?

Last year my good friend Dirk Beal tempted me into celebrating his birthday by breaking a vertical record on skis. We then exceeded our goal which was 50,000 vertical feet by tallying some 85,590. We then went home, licked our wounds and almost forgot about the freak achievement. A few weeks ago, Dirk subtly reminded me that we “could do better than that” around his 51st birthday; I foolishly nodded and yesterday I almost had a coronary in keeping up with the man – at least trying to showing off that I wasn't dead yet on skis.

Our goal was to break through the 100,000 barrier and we managed to do it. Most of it (20 miles worth of vertical) was achieved on one single lift, the mighty “Sultan Express” that whisked us 1,760 feet higher on the hill, every seven or eight minutes before we'd launch into a hair-raising downhill ride. We started early in the morning and ended up eight and a half hour later having clocked an amazing 112,750 vertical feet. We had just beaten Ski Utah's Nathan Rafferty and his buddies who set the previous record at 108,066 feet at Snowbird in 2007. I won't get into the technical details to describe how Dirk and his Deer Valley Resort associates set us up for success, but can only certify that no human being (or wildlife for that matter) died, or any blood was shed, as a result of the experiment. I felt a bit stiff after dinner, but I put that on the account of old age...

Record Notes:
As we were tumbling down “Stein Way” in order to break our vertical record on skis, I was intensely focused on what I was doing, but never took the time to be scared. Sure, I was aware that an inadvertent binding release or any kind of fall might happen, but didn't let these negative thoughts in the way. At times, the visibility was just terrible as we dove into the steeper pitch of the run, we couldn't see the texture of the snow and received that “delayed feedback” under our feet which gave us reasons to be concerned, removing the skis from their secured edge and making them wobble, not just chatter.

As the day progressed, the top of the run had also become so burnished by the repeated passage of skiers that there was no way to sink an edge into the surface and all became a form of “skid management” that miraculously kept us floating on the surface. Then, there were the trees; I carefully stayed away from all of them, as much as possible; I've long learned (three broken ribs later) that one can't win against them and it's much better to keep good distances.

Finally, there were the skiers and these were much tougher to negotiate. When we ski fast and are passing skiers left and right, we need to “guess” where their likely next turn may take them and this is far from being an exact science. Intuition and serendipity both play a huge role, at least I believe they do. Very fast skiers are a big problem if you happen to ski even faster, because they believe that no one will pass them and do all sort of weird moves. The bottom line is that this kind of exercise takes a huge and constant amount of concentration, to the point that the mental strain almost trumps the physical one. Can that be true? My brain didn't feel quite as stiff as my limbs the next morning...