(4) Don’t slow up before turning downhill.
(5) Don’t—if you can safely avoid it—turn at all.
When you can accomplish a run without falling or stopping, you may consider yourself a third-rate cross-country runner, being quite safe and not too slow.
When you can do so without falling, stopping, or stemming, your running will be sufficiently safe, fast, and in particular effortless, to be called second-rate.
When you can manage most of your run without either falling, stopping, stemming, or turning, you may be quite pleased with yourself.
The last sentence suggests a further word of advice.
It is seldom reasonable to feel very proud of one’s running, but it is often the greatest help to pretend to do so.
If after taking all possible pains to learn any manœuvre you still find a difficulty in doing it, try the effect of imagining yourself rather a desperate fellow—a careless, skilful, dashing person who has done this sort of thing all his life and thinks nothing of it. You will very likely find that this acts like a charm, and that it was only the stiffness that comes from over-carefulness which prevented you from succeeding before. A certain amount of “side,” in fact—whether natural or assumed—is really an excellent thing. Most good performers talk of their running—perhaps sincerely—with becoming modesty, but they seldom show much sign of this modesty in their actions when ski-ing—evincing, as a rule, a healthy self-confidence which might almost be mistaken for a desire to show off.
In the above series of “Don’ts” I have not included “Don’t use the stick,” because I trust it would never enter your head to do so. I might however have said, “Don’t be afraid of leaving your sticks at home,” for unless you want to race uphill or on the level you can easily dispense with them, and to do so occasionally will prevent you from getting into the slovenly habit of prodding with the inner stick at the end of every swing. Not that this prodding need be considered a very serious crime, for as long as a stick is used with one hand for pushing and not with both for pulling, no great harm will be done to the style. But this prodding is a slight waste of energy, and therefore the tendency to do it should be checked. To go without a stick at all occasionally is the best possible way to cultivate a perfectly free and effortless style, not only of running down a hill, but of climbing up it.
One sometimes hears the absurd statement that to tour without a stick is “unnatural,” and therefore not permissible. All ski-ing is “unnatural.” If it is “natural” to carry a stick, it is still more “natural” to lean on it hard the whole time. The only real and searching test of the skill and ease of a man’s running is to take away his stick altogether and see if he can run fast and steadily across any sort of country without it; and I strongly advise you to test your own running in this way from time to time.