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The weather is crisp - well, and raining here.  Are you ready for the season?  I'm already doing a bunch of the physical fitness parts of early season success.  But in addition to raking leaves, there's some homebound tasks I need to complete before my season starts on December 1st at training.  Guess I'd better get these done during the dark days of November.

My to do list:
  1. Find my boots in the basement.  They are somewhere behind the bike wheels, spare tires, rags, boxes of powdered drink mixes and camping gear.  somewhere.
  2. Try them on and call my bootfitter if I need to.  It's always easier to get work done in November than the week before Christmas.
  3. Find some skis, get the bindings set, wax 'em, tune them.  We left our skis in pretty good shape after our late Spring Utah trip last year, but I also picked up a new pair and we have a bit of switching around to do.
  4. Find poles.  Seems these are easy to forget the first trip of the season.
  5. Dig out all the clothes, wash with TechWash, order new mittens and any layers I anticipate needing.  Particularly important this year because I lost some weight.  I know many of my pants don't fit.  Hopefully the ones I bought in the spring on SteepAndCheap.com will!
  6. Touch base with our mountain's training and ski school directors.  I have some goals for the season.  If I let them in on it, often they can help me by providing assignments that further my goals.
  7. Email our PSIA-E dev. team coach.  See #6.  I'll ski with Matt at our upcoming training anyway, but always good to start the conversation early and let him mull things over.
  8. Reconnect with a few people I met out on the road last year who were looking for specific guidance this year in their ski teaching and training.
  9. Catch up on my PSIA SnowPro and 32 Degrees reading.  And tech manual review.  And start looking at some video while I'm on the stationary bike in the basement. 
  10. Review last year's notes from trainings, understudies, and clinics I led at the home mountain.  In truth, I've already done some of this and am starting to brainstorm how I can improve my teaching.  I was out on the road bike the other day thinking about how to get new instructors to coach movements more effectively and, in particular, how to demonstrate to them in a concrete way the differences between instruction and coaching.
  11. Flip through the latest toy guide and read a couple game reviews.  Yeah, I don't have kids.  But I get to teach them and I'm not exactly in the same movie demographic as they are.  Can't really expect a 6 year old to connect with me over the latest chick flick.
  12. Wait.  I'm really not a patient person.
Hope to see y'inz in a month or so!
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