The Bell Curve and the Halfpipe
Last week, an email landed in my inbox with an urgent request for volunteers for a regional ski and snowboard competition. I had a re-arrangable morning the next day and found myself lining up teenagers at the top of a halfpipe in their order of go.
An introduction to the sport: young humans (because one has to be young to do this thing, body and mind) slide up and down the “U” curve created by the halfpipe and gain enough speed to launch themselves in the air. While aloft, they do tricks like grabbing their skis and snowboards in various configurations, spinning and flipping, or a combination of the two.
This competition featured 13 to 17 year olds with armloads of talent. Most of them didn’t go to school, at least not in the winter, and as one of the coaches pointed out – they didn’t really have home mountains either. Indeed, he wondered aloud why he had a home at all given how much time the teams spend in hotels at various mountains across the country.
I was intimidated which is patently ridiculous as I will never try to do any of those insane things. But there was a vibe of immense coolness to teenagers who are technically competing but all know each other and were rocking out to whatever music was on their headphones and then look impossibly chill while chucking themselves in the air. It’s the kind of person I wished I could have been.
My job at the event was to ensure that we had the next several riders ready for their turn. It was fairly easy; they were teenagers, yes, and they were goofing around most of the time, yes, but they had also done this so many times before. I only had to employ the teacher voice once and it was because the athlete was listening to his music at volume eleven. Once he pulled out his earbud, everything went smoothly. They showed remarkable poise in controlling their mental game since this was a very “wait - wait - wait - now, go” kind of event. Being able to pull those tricks is one thing, being able to do it at a specific and wildly unpredictable time is another.
After a few hours of watching them contort their bodies, it was time for me to go. But as I walked down the hill, there was a bilateral reality occurring. The halfpipe was next to the beginner’s slope at the mountain, so only fifty feet of distance separated people doing multiple revolutions in the air from people pizza-wedging down the slope with bent knees and (understandable) masks of fear. In addition, all the traffic for that side of the mountain funneled into that run, so there were also ski patrollers bringing injured people down on the sled and expert skiers finishing days of winding around trees with ease. It was a wonderful mess absolute beginners, total experts, those in charge of keeping both safe, and everything in between.
As I walked down in my snow boots, I was in between the flippers and the wedgers. This is also true of my own self both in terms of my skiing ability and that I was a middle-aged mom and by far the least cool person on the entire slope. As most clearly indicated by my use of the ancient term “cool.” One of the many ways I was out of place and it bothered me but I did it anyway.
It bothered me, but I did it anyway, which is the thing that has allowed me to try so many different activities and average at most of them. Most of us are in the middle anyway, with our eleven-minute running miles and our wobbles on the bike and our hand blisters when we paddle for the first time in a year.
But just like that part of the mountain, the remarkable stands so close to average. Incredible talent can sit alongside the so-so. It does this in me and in you and in each of the children out there that day – whether they were just learning to ski or spinning off the side of the wall. The experts were average at something else and the newbies were remarkable at something too.
Both exist within us and among us.