Tirolean Boot Camp
I’m no stranger to the mountains but a week of winter sports in Austria is something of a boot camp for me. The problem is that half of Sally’s ever-so-hospitable family are Austrian. More accurately, they are Tirolean and can trace their family back through generations of mountain dwellers to Ötzi himself. The more recent generations have moved on from goat herding and smuggling to ski instructing and were, apparently, born with skis In situ. The glaciers have ground down their feet and on dry land and at sea they are a little wobbly but, with the help of attentive podiatrists, pedicurists and physiotherapists they still manage to hop happily around the alms and Alps. But once on skis they are transformed. All beaming smiles whilst hell bent on speed, grace and a quest to find what is on the other side of the mountain.
I, on the other hand, have no family connections with mountain people and never saw a set of skis until into my mid 20’s. I taught myself out of the Sunday Times Ski Book and I don’t ski for 51 weeks of the year. In every respect I am the archetypal British skier with no points for panache or poise and only a few points for perseverance.
Somehow Sally got some Tirolean blood in her veins and straddles the gap between brutish, British skiing and continental elegance. On foot I can keep up with her only by taking her into the higher ranges where hypoxia slows her down. On skis I haven’t a hope. She swoops down the slopes like a demon dressed in yesteryear’s yellow Goretex leaving only a soft and powdery plume of snow in her wake. In contrast I puff along behind kicking up clouds of snow with every turn.
The first part of the week was all prepared pistes and high speed cruising whilst trying desperately to keep rocket-powered Seppl in sight. Tens of thousands of metres were descended at eye-watering speeds but we still found time to visit picture-perfect huts serving hot chocolate and cafe creme. Everything a ski holiday should be.
At the end of the week Berta, Tirolean to the core, had some free time and so the pistes were abandoned for off-piste ski-touring. I sweated up the slopes trying to keep Berta and Sally in view through fogging sunglasses whilst they chattered their way up steepening, icy slopes. Occasionally they would pause to offer a few words of encouragement in the unrealistic hope that I would make the distant summit before nightfall.
Inevitably, I eventually caught them up only to find them cucumber cool and loving being in their element. The only decent thing to do was to let them off their leash and to slither my way down to the car and the cafes. As I write they are probably posing for selfies in front of the summit cross and gazing, lovingly out over the immaculate, snow smothered valleys and forest that were once the home to Ötzi some 5,000 years ago.
