No facet of today’s experience proved remarkable. Nonetheless this afternoon’s skiing felt among my best ever. I imagine this resulted from multiple factors collectively reaching a critical threshold. Tangentially I find myself pondering the nature of such matters in other domains.

My brain felt primed not just from quality sleep the previous evening but also consistently high quality sleep in recent months. My soft tissues felt limber from ample multi-modal exercise of late. My lungs felt no challenge from Snowbird’s 8-11k’ feet owing to nearly four months of living at Suncrest’s 6k’ and regular hiking of the flight parks’ steep hills. I had eaten and hydrated optimally. Ancillary routines around equipment and travel ran on auto-pilot. I leisurely enjoyed an audio book (Range: Why Generalists Triumph In A Specialized World) during the drive.

I did not hurt, get unduly tired, or struggle technically. I smoothly carved through turns on steep groomers, adroitly slid between large moguls, and consistently traveled from peak to base with little or no rest. I experienced Flow. Something magical begins to happen when you find yourself able to chain moment after moment together in an unbroken arc.

This offered quite the contrast from just a few weeks earlier. I came to the season with a knee injury that proved a bit scary, experiencing this on top of the usual soft tissue shock, muscle memory sluggishness, and altitude related CV struggles. I logged eight days on the slopes before taking off two weeks for the holiday crush. On any day where I had not skied the previous day the outside of my left knee felt funky in a way where I fretted that a single bad fall might cause it to explode. Yet today, after this time off, it felt utterly unremarkable from the first turn of my first run.

I have incredible gratitude for this specific experience but also find myself wondering how much better all manner of life experiences can prove when I am firing on all cylinders as the result of methodical, pervasive, and consistent self-care while also stacking the deck in my favor by making The Right Thing also be The Easy Thing.