MegèveSki

Learn from many different masters

Michelle's mum, Pat, had a bit of a fall yesterday afternoon on her lesson and hurt her ankle a bit so we ended up with a full day of instruction today rather than just a half day. We skied on the Rochebrune side and Lucy worked us hard all day. I discovered that although the Axendo's were fine for pottering around on they were hard work during the lesson; the others had much more success at the carving practice than I did.

It was interesting to compare the different teaching techniques between Lucy (ESF) and what we'd had from Warren Smith in Saas Fee and Verbier. The end goal was similar; although Warren was instructing for mainly off piste and freeride skills and Lucy was working on more piste based skills, the techniques we were learning were pretty much the same just at alternate ends of the scale. We asked a lot of questions to clarify what Lucy intended; not because her explainations were lacking but simply because we needed to make sure we understood what she meant in terms of the way that Warren had been teaching us; simple things like Warren suggesting we needed to be more two footed, and that when on piste we should be around 70% on the turning ski, and Lucy suggesting we needed to be more one footed (which turned out to be around 70% in the turning ski). It was useful to be able to take what we'd learnt with Warren and question Lucy on it and get another view on it; much as when we were speaking to Phil and Jamie on Warren's course, getting another instructor to put the concepts in their words sometimes made it easier to get to grips with what we had to do. One of the problems with improving your skiing is that the instructor needs to understand what their body is doing whilst skiing in a certain technique, they then need to verbalise that, you then need to understand that and finally you need to take that understanding and get your body and mind to do what you want it to do. You need to be able to start doing the analysis and verbalisation yourself so that you can compare what the instructors are telling you to do with what you're actually doing. There's lots of scope for error here and it's useful to have the same techniques explained by different people as one person's verbalisation may work better for you than anothers...

The lesson was hard work but by the end of the day I felt that I'd improved quite a bit and had plenty of things to work on, plus we knew more of the mountain. I felt more secure on the Axendo's but decided to demo something more modern for tomorrow. Lucy recommended Ski Technique at the Rochebrune lift and introduced us to David, the owner and told him about our abilities and what we were looking for. David was very helpful and I ended up with a pair of Rossignol B2's and Miche had some Dynastar Exclisive Spice (!). I intend to give the B2's a couple of days and then try some Dynastar 8000's (Lucy's recommended ski and the ski she uses when she's not teaching) and a few others before I decide what I'm going to buy.