Lean into the abyss: the counterintuitive beauty of skiing

Every instinct tells you to lean back.

You’re standing at the top of a slope that drops away beneath you like the edge of the world, and every fibre of your being screams to press your weight into the mountain behind you. To hold on. To stay safe.

And that’s exactly how you fall.

Something bigger

Skiing is perhaps the most counterintuitive sport ever devised. The first lesson any instructor will drill into you is this: lean downhill. Commit your weight forward, into the void, into the very thing that terrifies you. Lean into the mountain, and you lose your edges, your skis slide out from under you, and the mountain wins. Lean into the abyss, and suddenly you’re in control. Your edges bite. Your turns carve. The mountain becomes yours.

It’s a metaphor that extends far beyond the slopes. In medicine, business, relationships, and in life itself, the instinct to retreat to safety is often the most dangerous thing you can do. Growth lives on the other side of discomfort. The safe place, the familiar lean into what feels secure, is frequently where stagnation breeds and, paradoxically, where the real danger lies. You have to commit forward. You have to lean into the abyss.

I came to skiing as an adult, which means I came to it without the fearlessness of a five-year-old and with the full, vivid awareness of what a broken femur looks like on a CT scan. I’m a strong intermediate skier now. I took it up because I wanted to get out, to explore mountains in a way that hiking alone couldn’t offer.

What started as a personal challenge quickly became something bigger: our annual family vacation. There’s something about a family spending an entire day together on a mountain, riding lifts, exploring new trails, meeting at the lodge for lunch with cold cheeks and ridiculous goggle tans, that no beach vacation can replicate. The mountain strips away distractions. You’re present. You’re together. You’re alive.

The outside ski

The physics of skiing is as elegant as it is unforgiving. At its core, skiing is an exercise in edge control and weight distribution. When you initiate a turn, you roll your skis onto their edges — the metal strips along the base — carving a groove, your footing into the snow. The ski, when tipped on edge, follows a natural arc determined by its side cut, the subtle hourglass shape built into every modern ski.

The critical concept is the outside ski. In any turn, the ski on the outside of the arc bears 70-80% of your weight. Turning left, your right ski does the work. The only way you can achieve the weight on the downhill ski is by leaning downhill. The steep drop makes you instinctively lean uphill, but that puts weight on the uphill ski, causing you to freeze and fall. Loading the outside ski creates the pressure that bends it into its carve, that digs the edge into the snow, that gives you grip on a surface that otherwise offers almost none.

Skiing’s origins stretch back over 5,000 years. Rock carvings in Norway and ancient ski fragments across Scandinavia suggest humans were strapping boards to their feet long before anyone thought to do it for fun. The transformation from survival tool to sport began in the mid-1800s when Norway’s Sondre Norheim introduced heel bindings that allowed controlled turns. Alpine skiing joined the Olympic program in 1936, and the sport exploded.

Scaling talent

On any given weekend at any ski resort, you’ll witness one of sport’s great democratic spectacles. Thousands of skiers of every age and ability share the same mountain. A 70-year-old in a vintage one-piece rides the same chairlift as a teenager in a hoodie. A family pizza-plowing down a green run shares the base area with a local racing team of 10-year-olds who carve turns that would make most adults weep.

The amateur talent is staggering. Kids in youth racing programs tuck into gates with a ferocity that defies their size. Teenagers launch off terrain park jumps, executing backflips and corkscrews with a casualness that belies the athleticism required. Watching a pack of tiny humans in speed suits bombing down a race course is one of winter’s great joys — equal parts inspiring and terrifying for any parent watching from behind the fence.

Scale that talent to the pinnacle and you arrive at the Winter Olympics. Olympic downhill racers exceed 130 km/hr. Their legs absorb three to four Gs through every turn. The margin between gold and fourth place is often a hundredth of a second.

Johannes Hoesflot Klaebo of Norway competes in the cross country skiing men’s 4 x 7.5 km relay at the 2026 Winter Olympics in Tesero, Italy, February 15, 2026.
| Photo Credit:
AP

Of gifts and grit

The 2026 Milan Cortina Games have delivered moments that embody everything skiing is. Lindsey Vonn, the 41-year-old American legend, returned despite tearing her anterior cruciate ligament just nine days prior. Thirteen seconds into her run, she crashed violently and was airlifted off the mountain. Her message afterwards captured the essence of leaning into the abyss: no regrets, and a hope that others will find the courage to dare greatly. Her teammate Breezy Johnson then delivered a blistering run to win gold, becoming only the second American woman ever to claim the Olympic downhill title.

Today, Lucas Pinheiro Braathen — a 25-year-old born in Oslo to a Norwegian father and Brazilian mother and who switched his nationality to Brazil — won the giant slalom. It was the first Winter Olympic medal ever won by a South American country, and during Carnival season, no less. He celebrated with a samba in the snow.

No discussion of Olympic skiing is complete without Bode Miller, perhaps the most gifted Alpine skier America has ever produced. Six Olympic medals, 33 World Cup victories, and a style so aggressive that European coaches studied his impossible recoveries on endless loop. His most legendary moment came at the 2005 World Championships in Bormio, the very course where Braathen won gold this year, when Miller lost a ski 16 seconds into the downhill and continued on one ski at nearly 80 km/hr, navigating a World Cup course that most people couldn’t handle on two.

Working the body

Beyond the thrill, skiing is remarkably good for you. It’s a full-body workout disguised as fun. Your quads and glutes absorb constant eccentric loading through every turn, your core fires continuously to maintain balance, and the cardiovascular demand of a full day on the mountain rivals most gym sessions.

Studies have shown that regular skiing improves bone density, joint flexibility, and proprioception. At altitude, your body works harder with every breath and the combination of cold air exposure and sustained aerobic effort has been linked to improved cardiovascular health and mental resilience.

For those of us who track these things, a solid day of skiing can burn upward of 3,000 kcal. It’s one of the few sports where you forget you’re exercising because the mountain keeps demanding your full attention.

The economic footprint is enormous as well: a global industry valued at roughly $20 billion a year, with more than 65 million skier visits in recent U.S. peak seasons alone.

Lean into winter

The numbers also miss the point, however.

The real value of skiing is what it does to your relationship with winter. For most people, winter is something to endure: short days, cold commutes, a low-grade melancholy that doesn’t lift until March. Skiing inverts that entirely. Winter becomes something you anticipate, plan for, and countdown to.

You also meet incredible people on the mountain: in lift lines, on chairlifts with strangers who become friends for a six-minute ride through falling snow. Spirit is generous among skiers, a shared understanding that everyone chose to be there, chose discomfort over comfort, chose the abyss over the couch.

Winter is not all harshness and depression. When you lean into it — really commit, the way your instructor taught you on that first terrifying day — winter becomes perhaps the most exhilarating season of them all.

You have to look into the abyss.

Dr. Dinesh Arab is Director, Interventional and Structural Cardiology, AdventHealth Daytona Beach and Clinical Assistant Professor of Medicine, Florida State University. dinarab@yahoo.com