Frost - #JustWriteIt #Sports

Downhill

My dad was adjusting his goggles and I threw a snowball at him. 

"We forgot to share the chocolate bar." I said. 

"Shit, next time." he said. Which, like any time he swore, made me feel uncomfortable. 

One at a time I pressed the heels of my boots down onto each binding until they clicked. 

"Follow me dad." I skated away from him until the gradient of the hill began to carry my weight and we were skiing.

"Nice turns Nick." My dad said behind me. 

"Watch this." I arced across the run.

"I'm right behind you."

The wind covered my ears and focused my attention on my vision. The snow, a churned up mixture of fresh powder, was cut up and uneven. My short skis washed around under the surface, and my leg muscles burned as I tried to hold onto my edge. 

"Ahhhhhhhh." I screamed, bouncing through a patch of moguls hidden below a fresh layer of snow. The tips of my skis got crossed and it twisted my body sideways, sending me airborne off the next mogul. There is a moment I remember, right before I crashed, that I had spun 180 degrees and was looking at my dads face. His mouth was wide open but he wasn't saying anything. I hit the snow and tumbled once. When I opened my eyes my dad was above me. 

"You all right?" He asked?

"My skis got stuck together." I said.

I tried to wipe the snow from the lens of my goggles but it didn't work. The snow was on the inside. I was a big blizzard of a mess. My left ski pant had slid over the top of my boot and my gloves had come untucked from my sleeves. The icy-prickle of snow on skin began to burn. 

"Grab my hand." my dad reached out. 

"Did you see me?" I asked. 

"Let me help get some of that off you neck." He took a couple attempts to scrape the snow out from behind my neck but it made it worse. The material on his gloves was rough and more snow fell into my snowsuit than got scraped out. The ice fell between my long underwear and my skin and made my back muscles tighten up. 

My dad bent down so that his butt was almost touching the snow. "You were doing great, I could barely keep up." He helped pull my ski pant back over my boot but the snow that had slid into it was already starting to pinch around the top of my ankle. 

"Can we do only blue-diamond runs until we are warmed up?" I said, borrowing the term warmed-up from my limited understanding of athletics. I may not have understood what it meant to warm-up, but I knew I was cold, and whatever it took to warm-up was what I wanted.