Mark Urban is a well-known British journalist. But he felt at the end of the roll, and taking a vacation was no longer enough to give him energy back. His solution: go skiing in Switzerland. Narrative.
Mark Urban is used to war zones. He covered Afghanistan during the war with the Soviets in the 1980s, and returned there following 9/11. He followed the war in Iraq and became the diplomacy and defense specialist for the daily program Newsnight from BBC. “I felt completely drained mentally and went to seek relief in the mountains,” he explains to Financial Times.
At the age of 55, he decides to change – at least partially – his life. No question of being content with a few weeks of vacation in the great outdoors with your family. Mark Urban, who has been skiing since childhood, decided to become a ski instructor in Switzerland during the season. A kind of mid-life crisis he told the British daily:
If there is a possible point of comparison between my work as a journalist and my side job as a ski instructor, it is that you never really know what each day will hold in store for you. As for the differences, there are many, and it was to escape the pressures of my main job that I embarked on this path in 2015.”
Mark Urban might never have imagined, even in a dream, one day becoming “one of those demigods in a red jumpsuit” of the Swiss Ski School. However, he succeeded following having followed several training courses and an internship at the Swiss Ski School, in the resort where he now teaches. His friends find it difficult to understand his choice. “They might understand that I wanted to ski more, but not that I was spending my holidays giving lessons to brats or to their parents who were ‘stuck at a certain level’ and did not listen to advice and do not follow the examples.” Mark, on the contrary, loves to teach, to transmit, to see unexpected progress, to help a student overcome a handicap or trauma related to an injury.
On the financial side, the salary covers training for obtaining the license and equipment. “Anyway, if you’re a monitor over 40 years old who only performs this activity a few weeks a year, you are not doing this for the money! In the case of the youngest, who have taken a sabbatical, or who are in their twenties and want to teach the whole season, it is a little different: they may be able to put some money aside. ”
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