SNOW Alps 25-26 web - Flipbook - Page 96
“I need
comfort and
luxury to excel.”
The friend bailed after a few runs, but Handler was enchanted,
staying out on her own for some four hours. Though competent
enough, she was, admittedly, “not a great skier.” The worm
turned, however, during the Sundance Film Festival in Park
City, where she and a date joined a large group that headed up
a chairlift and right down a double black diamond riven by a
small, mandatory cliff. Handler took off her skis and climbed
back up with a few others who were similarly disinclined. “We
skied down another way and went for a cocktail,” she says.
“When I saw the guy later, he said Any woman worth her salt
would be able to get down that. I knew in that moment that not
only did I have to ditch him, but that this was never going to
happen to me again: the next break I got, I was going to spend
an entire winter in a ski resort.”
That turned out to be Whistler, which she’d previously
visited and enjoyed for its size, range of food options and
après scene, a combination she likens to “as close to a Euro
ski experience” as one can find in North America. Hunkering
down, she took lessons from a pro and logged 55 days.
Though the ski-instructor trope has always been treated
as both heroic and comedic, a revered but rule-bound cliché,
Handler embraced the essence of personal coaching. “I’m very
much in need of technical expertise. You need to show me how
to use my body. And for me, as a woman, female instructors are
way more effective than males,” she says of a switch she made
a few years in. “I need a woman to show me how to move my
body.”
Handler also discovered she loved skiing both trees and
powder, which each require a different suite of technical skills,
something she became obsessed with. “Once you start to get
good at something, you become more interested in it,” she says
of years spent doing drills, pounding the snow, and figuring out
how to turn herself into a really capable skier. “I just worked on
everything and became addicted to the technicality of it.”
So addicted, that at the end of her original two-month stint
in Whistler she didn’t want to leave. “The skiing was getting
great and I was getting great at skiing,” she says. “And once I
started getting good, I couldn’t stop.”
Bubbling away in the background of this ski gestalt,
however, was more than mere technical savvy. A therapist
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eventually pointed out that it was obvious why Handler loved
skiing so much: because one really had to focus and be present,
not preoccupied with anything else when on some level you
were literally just trying to survive. “Being present is how I feel
whenever I ski,” she says. “And in today’s world that’s a gift.”
Wanting more of what she was experiencing, Handler
purchased a chalet in Whistler during the early part of the Covid
pandemic, obtained a work visa for Canada and hunkered down
to ski in the relative anonymity of a place that for the most part
eschews the culture of celebrity. It would become the perfect
escape hatch.
Antithetical to life in LA, Handler keeps a completely
different schedule in Whistler.
