MegèveSki

The curious incident of the left turn falling overs

This week is fast becoming "Len's broken technique week". First I had my right leg chattering and now, having fixed that, I have a reoccurrence of a rather worrying problem that I have on left turns... Every so often I just end up on my side, sliding down the slope with my skis directly in front of me like someone who's decided to lie down on the slope rather than stand up on it. Amusingly this only ever seems to happen on the steepest of slopes and less amusingly this seems to be the exactly the same MO as the fall that did my knee in Verbier. This problem needs fixing fast...

The good news is that I've fixed the chattery right leg that I was having trouble with earlier in the week. The "stand tall" solution seems to have worked; keep the thighs high (ie almost upright), the core held in tight, shoulders forward and ankles flexed and everything seems to work nicely. Up until the final run today I'd had a good day and things felt almost as good as the carving in Les Gets and in general it all felt much more controlled and comfortable. I was much more in balance in this new stance and that makes you more confident as bumps, pitch changes and changes in snow conditions don't affect you as much. Unfortunately I finished the day with a slide down the top slope of Voltigeurs, a rather nice black on Mont d'Arbois that had great snow on it - I know it had great snow because I collected most of it in my jacket and neck warmer during my little slide.

The slide started like the other curious left turn falls (at least two in Verbier and one the other day on the top slope of Pylones). There I am thinking about doing a nice, speed controlled, hip crossover turn with the inside ski entering the turn first and lots of commitment to the slope and the next thing I'm on my side sliding down the slope as if I'd just decided to lay down. The fall on Pylones had an element of "I was in the back seat a bit" about it, but this one was a simple case of "and now I'll lie down"... It's frustrating because there's it's hard to analyse what is going wrong, one minute I'm entering a nicely controlled turn and the next it's Mr DownhillOnHisArse and his amazing snow collecting show.

I'm pretty sure that I'm leaning in to the slope, for some reason. It's pretty much the only explanation that makes sense to me. Somehow I'm committing to the turn, rolling my hips across but keeping my upper body in line with my hips and knees rather than dropping my down hill shoulder down the hill to keep my weight over the turning ski. My whole body leans into the slope, my ski edges disengage and I'm Mr Slide... Given that on today's fall there was no element of forward motion across the slope, just a straight slide down the slope, I'm pretty convinced that I'm committing to the turn nicely, just doing it completely incorrectly and ending up with my skis skipping out. I need to fix this one fast as it's potentially rather nasty now that it only seems to happen on slopes when I would least want it to happen. I'll get Miche to watch my left turn when we ski next and, perhaps, take the video out so that I can see what I'm doing. Now, off to get the books out and work out some drills to stop me being a muppet...

Today we skied down towards St Nicolas. I don't know this area that well and managed to find lots of path-like pistes that provided access to some great looking powder but that wasn't on today's menu (and it was all pretty tracked out) so I could have chosen better. Still, I now know that Marmottes is to be avoided unless you're using it to go off piste and that you're better off staying on Epaule. We had lunch at Les Communailles, the restaurant that Jon showed us on his "this is how late you can ski Mt Joly and still catch the last drag lift out after an uphill walk" day... This is a nice little restaurant at the bottom of some rather quiet runs down to the Communailles drag lift. After lunch we skied of Mt Joux and finished up sliding down Voltigeurs.