Notes to self: going back to skiing after a (long) while, pt. II
Dear past me,
No matter how ridiculous it may sound, your notes on skiing really helped! In fact, they made a pretty dramatic difference in both technique and, more importantly, endurance, allowing me to make the most out of the few ski trips we did this year.
Though I can’t return the favour, I can at least pay it forward to future us; I will point out, though, that we are doing all the work but he will be the one reaping the benefits. The little shit! I hope someone will find a way to put an icy snowball down the back of his jacket.
Anyway, back to your wonderful notes, there’s really only one that I feel requires further elaboration:
- You worry too much about forward / backward weight placement. Let your body find the right balance given the conditions on the slope.
Actually… No. You are just plain wrong here. Though I will admit that we tend to obsess about technique to a fault, future us is going to have much more fun on his next skiing trip if he could spend a few minutes practicing using the levers intrinsic to the geometry of the ski-boot system to make the downhill ski bite into the snow during turns. If done correctly, this will compress the normally slightly-bent ski into a flatter shape, temporarily storing energy that will be released upon exiting the turn as the springback force, vectored into additional forward momentum.
When done correctly, doing the above should result in the absence of that pesky and terribly inelegant sideways skidding of the downhill ski called chattering that plagues the later hours of our skiing sessions. It should also result in a small but perceivable acceleration when exiting the turn or, at least, in the absence of a perceivable deceleration. Experientially, I have found that keeping the downhill ski ever so slightly behind the uphill one helps with maximizing leverage, resulting in less muscle fatigue required to exercise the same amount of downward pressure.
For this to work, the fit of the boot is critical. The heel of our foot should never move upwards, no matter how much pressure we exert on the front of the boot through the tibia, thus allowing ourselves to shift our center of gravity a little forward of what we would otherwise settle into.
Obviously, even a perfect and consistent execution of the above — which is called carving, by the way, and is the entire reason behind the side cutouts of modern ski geometries — will get us nowhere near being able to keep up with our wife, who will continue zooming past us in a manner that appears to defy physics.
Oh well, at least we won’t be too far behind.