It was late at night to be fondling broccoli in the grocery store.

Snow was falling and my kids and wife were at home in bed. I was at City Market on a stealth mission, to raid the produce section in search of those small thick rubber bands that are ideal for retaining the brakes on a pair of skis.

Why?

Well, I needed the rubber bands to tune the kids’ skis. But in the bigger picture I was pilfering the elastics because there is a certain lawless attitude in the search of speed on frozen slopes.

To be honest I don’t know what drives people to do anything for the sport, but I do know that it - whatever it is - has inspired countless brodies to ski right past a “Closed” sign and under a rope (or, more domestically, right past the iceberg to the rubberbanded broccoli).

Maybe someone should ask Bill Johnson or Bode Miller.

With two kids ski racing, I am spending more and more time in our unheated garage tuning skis. I don’t think it much matters to the kids – it psyches them up, keeps me out of the house and somehow I usually end up waxing my wife’s Nordic skis as well.

As a parent and an upstanding citizen, it seems odd to go to the store specifically to pocket some rubber bands. But that is what I did.

The excitement was palpable, and yes, I realize that makes me sound like such a geek.

I love tuning skis. I am not all that good at it. But it takes me back to the reasons I left my job on Wall Street in the late 80’s to climb and ski bum. As a kid living within a stone’s throw of the ocean for many years I was enamored with the mountains. Now I live in them and after 19 years have found more honest options to legally acquire methods of ski brake retention.

Oh, and about that elusive draw that skiing has, my son feels it to. This past weekend he asked Bode for his autograph at the finish of the Birds of Prey Combined in Beaver Creek and for no reason Miller gave the boy his 4th place FIS medal.

Penn Newhard left his Wall Street job as a municipal bond trader in 1989 to relocate to Colorado. Eight years later, he founded Backbone Media, where he is still a partner. He lives in a log cabin with his wife Kirsten and their four children.