Hi There!

OK, you ever have those moments when you just break out in a belly-aching laugh that lasts so long and hurts so much that you think you’re going to just suffocate?

That’s what just happened to me and my friends in Sestriere, Italy. Rory, Kazuko, Stephan and I decided to go on a hike after my downhill training run today, but when we got to the cross country skiing path, we spotted a couple of barrier pads (the kind that they put over lift towers as padding). Rory and I knew what we had to do… use them as sleds!

We grabbed 1 of them and started to do a couple of practice runs, the 4 of us all on one. We didn’t quite get the physics and crashed several times, each time laughing harder than the last… the longer we went on the more spectacular the crashes, piling on top of eachother, doing summersaults…

Then, an Italian cross country coach spotted us and yelled at us in Italian, something to the effect of “hey! You can’t do that here! Those pads are not made for sledding!” OK, I have no idea what he said, but he was pissed. So, what were we to do? Let him spoil our fun or run away?

Run away.

There’s just no way we’d let somebody be a party-pooper! So we found ourselves a better hill. A steeper hill. The mother of all sledding hills. It was love at first sight. I swear the thing must have been 75 degrees steep. And I gotta say, that I was a little intimidated.

Well, we picked our line up the steep ascent (see photo) and slowly took it step by step through the thigh-high snow. Now I know what those people who climb Everest must feel like… BRUTAL!

But we made.

Stephan and I hopped on and immediately FLEW down with such speed that I was darn near gonna pee my pants. But I took it like a champ and was all excited when suddenly Stephan wussed out and bailed on me, sending the pad in a tailspin and whipping me off. The momentum took me down the hill with several more rolls and when I came to, burried in the snow I yelled out in disbelief: “You WUSS Stephan! How could you bail on me like that?”

Kazuko and Rory took it all the way from top to bottom with a spectacular crash at the very end, which left both of them bathed in snow.

Of course, I wasn’t satisfied with our performance that first run, so we had to go again. So, back up the hill, hop on and this time NO LETTING GO. And we did it! Here are the pictures from that epic finale…

It’s always sooooo good to just let go and have some fun, just like when we were kids: let go and don’t hold back! I hope you will give it a shot this weekend… wherever you are, whatever you do, do it FULL POWER.

That’s what I plan to do this weekend. We’ll see if it will be as great a success as the sledding today. Tune in and find out how Sestriere races go!

Ciao Belli,

Jules