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The Weight of the Turn

Originally posted on Powder | By Jack O'Brien | Last updated Aug 12, 2026 11:26 AM ET

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Sunlight burst through the southern window near my workout station, warming the black rubber floor, releasing that familiar smell of sweat and gym mats.

As I stood over the barbell, a swirl of reminders filled my mind, like the overloaded swing thoughts I used to carry as an ineffectual youth golfer. Only this time, I was a graying dad lifting weights, partly out of fear I would soon be unable to put muscle on. But more than training to open jars in my seventies, this trip to the gym was borne on hope. That a stronger, even older me would ski better. That the current highs in the mid-nineties just might relent before a good winter, making this all worth it. And so I thought as I crouched over the bar.

Align your neck with your spine. Lift the bar naturally.

As a college student, I lazily lifted weights at the aging CU Boulder gym, clad in red brick and lit with gigantic incandescent bulbs installed decades prior. But my ideal accompaniment to skiing then wasn’t strength and cardio training. Instead, I would more often watch the snow fall at midnight from a barstool while binge drinking to live music on winter break. Sometimes I actually made first chair the next morning. Many times, I didn’t.

Working out for—or even working on—skiing wouldn’t enter my mind until years later. Because I had created a fallacy in my mind. I imagined that as skiers, the pros must be just like me, perhaps just a bit stronger in a turn, with a little more gumption off a cliff. I imagined we were all lifestyle slackers who partied and just happened to rip.

But that facade was primed to fall. Working from home one day, I peered out over the valley from my makeshift office, killing time, when I found an article on the Red Bull website. It was a winding piece on professional skiers and siblings Johnny and Angel Collison. The article detailed how both had endured knee injuries and had found a fresh perspective in mind and body.

But what I took from the article was something different. In the title image, a shirtless Johnny Collison was toned like a marble statue. And later in the piece, an image showed Angel Collison executing an expert yoga pose effortlessly as she looked into the camera.

I wasn’t just looking at the sunless skin of my barfly contemporaries; these were legitimate athletes, both naturally gifted and dead-set on achievement. Johnny, then 27, had been the youngest to climb the highest peaks on each continent—at just seventeen—before becoming a professional big mountain skier. Angel herself won the Freeskiing World Tour overall crown in 2010, before that having just missed a berth on the US National Ski Team. Through their teens and twenties, they trained, set goals, and excelled. And that had continued.

“Johnny…decided to go beyond the basic work of rehabilitating his knee,” the article noted. “Over the past year, he’s spent six to seven days each week in the gym, working on different aspects of his fitness and strength.”

The only thing we actually had in common was that we had all had knee injuries. That was where it ended.

Rafael Bastante/Europa Press via Getty Images

By my late twenties, something began to stir inside me. Late nights had lost their luster, as had simply sitting around, something I was all too prone to do.

My run-of-the-mill knee scope in the fall of 2014, at the age of 26, was supposed to get me on snow in just a few weeks. Instead, I skied on just five outings that spring, all the while hobbling through the dining room of the steakhouse I waited at with the hitched gait of an unhealed joint.

A friend suggested cycling for rehab. The next summer, I pulled out my dad’s aging KHS mountain bike. Its vintage blue, yellow, and teal frame and almost rigid front suspension even then seemed archaic. But the old man had kept it in good shape, and I started riding up the steep, dusty, then seldom ridden trails of the local ski area. One day, under the fading yellow sun of a midsummer evening, feet clad in tennis shoes inside the bike’s aged toe baskets, I made it to the top. And on that old bike, I entered one of the downhill trails. I skidded the berms and missed the sweet spot in most of my turns. I barely made it over the small rocky features and even walked around others. But something had changed as I descended at speed past ferns and aspen at nine thousand feet.

I bought a new mountain bike on pro deal a few years later, not much before my thirtieth birthday, and started climbing up the ski area several days a week. I was never fast on the climb, and my descents only marginally improved. One day, on a new set of clipless pedals, I rode up a steep section of my usual ride that crested at a bridge. My front tire paused on a three-inch board, and I slowly lost my balance, falling over the bridge and into the dry creek bed below.

But I had found a climb worth making, no matter the struggle.

I found that on snow, too.

On my first outing on telemark skis, and in ski lessons for the first time in decades, I slid down a cat track I routinely avoided in favor of a more difficult, exciting run. But I was gripped. Both by the feeling of being out of control and the beginning of a passion. Our instructor had given us a few drills to help us get used to our new technique and equipment. On that sunny day on old skis I had borrowed, I went straight for a lunging turn. “Slow down, Jack! Stick with the drills!” the instructor bellowed. But it was too late. I was smitten.

Later on, after more time on the unstable telemark rig, I began pushing harder, trying to keep up with my friends. One day, at the top of a steep rollover, already struggling to catch up to the group, I pushed into the fall line, its gray snow melding with the overcast horizon into a flat white. Deep in a lunging turn, I quickly changed leads and clipped my other ski. I suddenly fell forward with all my momentum, right onto my chest and face. My head spun, and I gasped for breath. I rose to my feet quickly, shook off the fall, and continued onward. Further down, on another steep section, I pushed into my turn and again caught my skis together, and the scene replayed itself.

I just had the worst crash of the season twice in one run, I thought as I brushed snow off myself. But I got up and skied on.

I’m sitting in front of my fluorescent computer monitor, roughly forty internet browser windows open. And I’m struggling as I write this article, groping for words. For relief, I let each distraction take over. LinkedIn puzzle games. Checking my email over and over again. Until something drives me back to this digital page. Just like it brought me back to the gym.

There I am again, standing over the bar, this time with my hands on my knees, gasping for breath after completing the grueling circuit my wife wrote up for us. My heart pounds, and I take a quick shot of water from my bottle resting on the windowsill.

Align your neck with your spine. Lift the bar naturally, I think.

And I lift that weight.