Very sad to miss little Isla today – she had a bad cough the past two days and still made great progress with her skiing. I hope she recovers soon.
Our goal today was to fast track Grace and Mya into parallel skiing – eliminating the pesky snowplough as much as possible. The fact is it takes too long to learn to pivot properly so we had to find a different way to bring things together. Starting at Aime 2000 we had good terrain for training so we went straight into skiing with dynamics – the dynamics being the purpose of all our drills for the previous few days. Queues at the bottom obliged us to head up to Montalbert and use the steeper icy runs over there for a while – which turned out to be perfect for working on sideslipping. Skis are designed to slide sideways, forwards or a bit of both simultaneously so it’s crucial to learn to slide sideways for breaking the defensive habit of stemming the uphill ski into a snowplough.
Back at Aime 2000 Grace commented on how she made a “stop” with her skis parallel – naturally twisting her skis around to force the heels/tails outwards. I then showed her the correct way to do this – driving the belly button (centre of mass) rapidly inwards instead and not pushing the skis outwards. We used a shallow gradient and did hockey stops by moving the centre of mass abruptly uphill. Obviously – if we do the same on the downhill side this leads to making a turn (with dynamics) perfectly and it’s a sharp turn as well. Grace and Mya were by now well versed in basic dynamics so this rapidly lead to pretty consistent parallel linked turns even on steep terrain. naturally there were a few wipe outs too but that’s normal when learning.
Once you have the feel of good dynamics then it’s like having learned to ride a bicycle – you’ve “got it”!
Our final run right at the end brought us to bear witness to a helicopter landing for an injured person being evacuated. When the helicopter passed overhead at only a few metres above us it was like being transported into a wild blizzard and Grace was blown over – the rest of us just managing to stay upright.
