When I ski, I take both of my legs off and get into a sit ski: a ski with a custom seat that has been molded for me. I use my core and arms to propel myself on snow with help from ski poles.
I started going on ski trips at senior school. I can't remember exactly where but we skied in the Tirol in Austria a couple of times and also went to Val d'Isère in France. When I was 15, rugby took over and there wasn't time to ski any more. I didn't ski again until I was 33.
There's been times when I've been in really tough shape at the top of the course. Talk about a hard challenge right there. I mean, if you ever tried to ski when you're wasted, it's not easy. Try and ski a slalom when … you hit a gate less than every one a second, so it's risky, you know. You're putting your life at risk there. It's like driving drunk only there's no rules about it in ski racing.
I had to think about ankle torsion, where the screws are on the ski, how that affects the forces going into the ski and how the ski bends, your leverage points. It was a challenge. I was having the greatest time, making the mistakes, crashing.
In 2012, I was invited to a ski event called the Hartford Ski Spectacular to learn how to sit-ski for the first time. I loved it, but it was not pretty - I was not good. I didn't know how to stop, so I kept throwing myself on the ground.
Most people work fifty weeks a year so they can do this the other 2. Well the smart ones live in a ski resort, where the boss lets them have powder snow days off. And almost forty feet of snow falls every winter thats a lot of days off. A lot of doing what you moved here to do. Most major ski resorts are now so big that regardles of what kind ofjob you have in a city there's probably a job almost exactly like yours in a ski rsort like this. So quit your job and rent that U-haul trailer now so next winter this can be you. Not you just sitting there watching this and wishing that this was you.
If I ask anybody who learned to ski after the age of five, they can remember their first day of skiing-what the weather was like, who they went with, what they had for lunch. I believe that's because that first day on skis was the first day of total freedom in their life.
All my children ski now, they don't have a choice. They have to join mom and dad on the ski hill.
When I travel, I always have about 40 pairs of skis with me, plus a ski technician and a ski coach.
I learned to ski in the Dolomites at the age of five. Ski lifts didn't exist then, so I did everything on foot.
But then I hit my 20s and only made two albums, and now I live in a ski resort as a ski bum basically.
I had no money, no training facilities, no snow, no ski jumps, no trainer, but I still managed to ski jump for my country - and getting there was my gold medal.
I am not a big skier, but I love apres-ski wear and imagine I would look great in an all-white, fur-trimmed ski suit.
When you don't have food in your life, just for a day, it makes you realise you're lucky to have it the next day. So the day after fasting, the music that comes out will be very joyous.
When things don't go your way, the day after you wake up and try to get better and be as good as you can be the next day.
But is it such a bad thing to live like this for just a little while? Just for a few months of one's life, is it so awful to travel through time with no greater ambition than to find the next lovely meal? Or to learn how to speak a language for no higher purpose than that it pleases your ear to hear it? Or to nap in a garden, in a patch of sunlight, in the middle of the day, right next to your favourite fountain? And then to do it again the next day?