In Defense of Full-Body Spandex
My experience as a D1 athlete didn’t start with free Nikes. When I arrived on campus for the first time, my new coach led me past the stately brick-and-ivy football building and the track, off the athletic campus, and to the school’s recycling warehouse, where Harvard’s varsity ski team is based. He opened the door to reveal a tiny room cluttered with ski waxing benches, oversized duffels, rainbow clusters of racing skis, and scattered posters of Olympic skiers peeling off the stark white walls. I could tell right away that this wasn’t the latest in ski technology: this was a home.
As I think Drew Faust told us during an Opening Days speech (while I daydreamed about brunch), a liberal arts education is about being immersed in a variety of subjects and activities, exploring new avenues of thought, and finding things that I’m passionate about to build my future around. When I get asked what I plan to do with my English degree, I can come up with some rough answers, like journalism, publishing, or sleeping on a futon in my parents’ basement, but I’ve never been able to explain why I ski besides the weak note of “I love/like it.” Skiing could never be represented on a résumé; it can hardly go into words: the euphoria of cresting a hill with lactic acid burning in my legs, the swift rushes of biting-cold air that whistle past my ears as I tuck down the next hill—it’s a “you had to be there” thing to the extreme. It’s an addiction. It’s incredible.
Why do I ever need to explain why I ski? It seems that the idea of exploration that’s at the heart of a liberal arts education is a two-sided coin. We’re told to seek new passions, but enough of them (and sufficiently highbrow ones) to please the looming shadows of our grad- and med-school admissions counselors, our future employers, or our own parents, who can range from supportive-but-confused to intimidating and overbearing. It took me far too long to realize that the kid in Annenberg who lists off all 12 of her clubs might just feel that these commitments are what make her education worthwhile, or, scarier, what give her personal worth.
I spent the past summer working at home, and, though I love my hometown and family, I repeatedly felt that I was doing something wrong: I should be somewhere else doing a harder job that would help me more in the future. I must not be involved or accomplished enough at school, and skiing, my weightiest and seemingly most random extracurricular, must be the culprit. As I sweated through running workouts and the Harvard weight room’s take-home lifting plan, I did the unthinkable. After 15 years, I questioned why I skied, and I couldn’t seem to find an answer.
Skiing did not get me admitted into college, nor was it the source of my financial aid. It probably won’t help me find a writing job when I graduate. I could pull out the shifty claim that skiing was the lone factor that taught me to be self-disciplined and work hard, but I also have my parents and teachers to thank for that one. Skiing does keep me from getting fat, but a healthy physique and varsity status are far from mutually exclusive—there are easier ways to stay fit than a racing sport.
Last summer, as I asked myself why I skied, I eventually cycled out of frustration and found my answer in the tiny places where I wasn’t looking: in the rustles of coniferous boughs above my head during a trail run, in the stillness of the water during an early-morning rowing workout, in the satisfaction of sitting down to a hot breakfast after a morning lift. I love skiing because I LOVE it. It brings me peace and gives me a chance to be strong and graceful, and that will always be enough of an answer to get me out of bed and into running shorts or Harvard Skiing’s signature full-body red spandex. Leaving campus for snowy Vermont on the weekend with my 12 best friends is consistently refreshing, a great reminder that the worth of my college experience could never be summated in red ink in the margins of a paper. The people I respect most aren’t the ones with the most accolades or financial security; they’re the ones who do something with a determination and passion that radiates out of their work, be it a novel, medical research, or a first-place finish by a split second.
As an English concentrator, I am officially here to say that there is no symbolism whatsoever behind my status as a varsity skier and that I’m not particularly concerned about how it will play into the other parts of my life’s plot. I’m sure it will, though, and I’m excited to see how.