My wife and I have just done a learn to ski in a day course at SNOzone in Xscape in Milton Keynes.
I’m less tired than I expected, at least physically. I think it uses a subset of the muscles that get used by road cycling. Mentally I’m exhausted, as there was a lot to learn; and most of it contrary to what I’m used to from cycling. For instance, if you lean into a corner on skis (placing your weight on the inner ski) you go in the wrong direction. To turn right, you need your weight on the right edge of your left ski; that takes some getting used-to.
I’m glad we learnt on real snow, as we found there is a significant qualitative difference between different sorts of snow. There were patches of crisp snow which were really easy to work with; deep fluffy bits which were difficult to traverse without losing lots of speed; and packed ice sections which were tricky to get past without picking up more speed than desired. Since the real world must have all these (and probably more) and a homogeneous dry slope can only simulate at most one of them, I think we made the right choice in choosing to learn on snow.
The training slope has 2 sections, the long lower section is shallower than the upper section. I only tried the upper part once; I ended up having to descend in a straighter line than I anticipated to miss other slope users which meant I reached the bottom going too fast and ended-up punching a new hole in the safety-net at the bottom.
By that point I was thinking too slowly to do the steep section properly, so I’ll have to save that for a future training session.
