Yet for some reason, I still get up at 7.15 every morning - on holiday - strap on my gear and haul myself up the mountain in the freezing cold.
Why? Because it's magical. Not always, of course - on more than one occasion in the past few days I've wondered why the hell I was putting myself through it. This morning I briefly contemplated going back to bed. But I've learned that losing the love is inevitable once in a while. The key is not to throw your toys, get a hot chocolate, and start afresh. It's meant to be fun, remember?
Whistler hasn't given us the easiest ride this week. On the one hand, the weather is amazing - fresh snow every day, more powder than we could possibly have hoped for. But the flipside has been some ferocious conditions on the mountains - gale force winds, heavy snowfall, poor visibility. This has often kept the high-altitude terrain shut.
This week is Spring Break in Canada - half term, as far as I can gather. Combined with the weather it's made for some big queues. Whistler is typically busiest at the weekends and quietest on a Monday. Imagine our dismay when we turned up at our nearest chairlift (the Wizard) on Monday morning to discover that half of Vancouver had got there first. There was muttering.
Nevertheless, although the fragile balance between pleasure and pain has occasionally tipped the wrong way, for the most part we've continued as we started. After four straight days on Blackcomb we've spent the last two on Whistler; highlights for me have been the terror-spiked rush of Seppos - a steep, bumpy, cliff-strewn black diamond run - and the slightly less sphincter-clenching Peak2Peak lift line trail, a powder-filled glade beneath the huge gondola cables.
We've spent almost no time on groomed pistes - partly because the snow has fallen so fast that the groomers can't keep up, and partly because here, there's always a more interesting route down the mountain.
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