First thing to take from today’s “soft snow” situation is that when the outside ski was “breaking away” it wasn’t the snow that was the problem – it was the pressure being too far back on the ski – again!
In the main video two runs are presented – the first is without big ruts which seems to be the best run and the second is the final run of the day when there were big ruts – which was more of a challenge and so is really probably the best run of the day – with natural adaptation to the ruts taking place through extension and compression/retraction of the legs.
The training lift was shut down abruptly by the Pisteurs due to a localised avalanche so we lost useful time in the ruts and required a snowmobile to bring us uphill to take down the course. Not a single ski lift on the Bellevarde plateau was operating as the rest of them were stopped for high winds. Very annoying.
I tried to teach bumps a little – when there weren’t any significant bumps around so that Alex could start to feel the relevance for slalom regarding how a turn transition is made. With the braking/pivot turn this can only be done properly with good weight on the ski pole (top of the bump) – which is different from racing where no weight ever goes on the ski pole. Alex was hopping a bit so the “compression/retraction” timing needs some work. This is all about working on getting forward – just in a different context but in many ways it corresponds to racing in ruts. When I say to use the outside edge of the foot in a pivot turn it’s really to allow the ski to rotate the lower leg below the knee. When the foot is jammed on its inside edge this loose rotation and suppleness of the joints is lost – and so is 90% of the fun that can be had from skiing bumps well.
