When do you stop skiing or riding?
Is there ever an appropriate time to stop snowboarding or skiing? The answer is yes, though for some of us, that won’t come until much later in life.
In 2000, I took a trip to Aspen with a group of people who had been making an annual trip there since the late 1960s (that is, before it became a ritzy place). Most of the people had worked at the same company at some time in their lives, or at the least (like me) were friends or relatives of someone who had. The group had a setup that worked for them. They had a single travel agent who bought group (discounted) tickets and arranged lodging, again at a discounted price. The group was big enough to allow people to hive off into smaller groups for each day–some went to Snowmass, some went to Buttermilk, and so forth–but small enough that they could all see each other during apres-ski.
I have made several return trips to Aspen with that group. Over the years people have started to drop out. First it was one person, or perhaps a married couple. Then the dropouts occurred with increasing frequency.
Usually, health is the culprit: An increased risk of high-altitude pulmonary edema here, shot knees there. Sometimes the cause is tragic, such as the onset of Parkinson’s. Sometimes it’s as routine as increased vulnerability to aches and pains. Vertigo is an increased problem for others, and declining eyesight a concern for others.
Changes in the body, then, bring one set of factors. We can do some things to maintain and even improve our health as we age, but we can’t stop aging.
A change in perspective can be another reason why someone stops riding. I once knew a lady from New England. We exchanged a number of e-mails about snowboarding, and even shared some stories about our family lives. She had been snowboarding longer than I had been, so she was something of a mentor to me.
Yet after a while, she disappeared. Why? One reason is that she had spent a lot of time in the Rockies, riding mountains much bigger than anything available in her part of the country, and on snow that was usually better than what she had available to her. She lost all interest in riding in the east. For some reason, she lost interest in riding altogether, and I haven’t heard from her in years.
Perhaps she encountered the dead end found by the author of Ecclesiastes, a book of the Bible. It is the memoir of a man who obtained or at least experimented in everything available to him: wisdom, achievement, wealth, laughter, sex, fine food and drink. After immersing himself in each of these, he rendered the same verdict: “vanity,” to quote the King James, or “useless” or “meaningless” to quote more current translations. I suspect that he would have tried snowboarding had it been available in the ancient Middle East. I’ll leave it to you to read through Ecclesiastes and come to your own conclusions, but I will say that it has helped me think through a number of questions.