MegèveSki

Lovely day

Another wonderful day with clear skies, lots of sun and not a lot of wind. We're forecast snow for tomorrow so we made the most of today and lunched outside at Les Manderines.

Helena had another lesson with Lucy and Brian skied with us. We started with a run down to Les Manderines to book a table for lunch and then continued down Pylones for a bit of a warm up. Back to the top and then down to the Mont Rosset chair for a few before heading down to the Arbois lift and the Michel Dujon black (top's nice, but it's a bit short). After that we did the bumps down the side of Freddy, they were bigger and nastier than last time we did them, which highlighted the problems with my style nicely. As if to rub in my dismal performance on the Freddy bumps I was followed down by a 9 year old on telemarks who effortlessly took the fall line... Ho hum.

The Freddy bumps gave us a taste for it so we took the Mt Joux chair and did the bumps on the right hand side as you get off. These were a nicer shape than the Freddy ones and the troughs weren't quite so harsh. I did much better on these and was controlled the whole way down. I had one "I'm back" moment but I managed to get forward well before the next turn so it wasn't really much of an issue. I did them fluidly and quite fast and my legs were ready for lunch by the time I got to the end of it.

We were 20 mins early when we got to the top of L'Ideal chair so did a quickie down the Princess Black and arrived dead on time to meet Helena after her lesson.

We long lunched and then found that everyone else had finished lunch and most of them were waiting at the Mt Joux and L'Ideal chairs; we cut down to the bottom and there was an equally large queue for the main bubble back up so we took the cable car back to Rochebrune and did a run or two there before having some happy hour beers and then heading home for a sleep.

In the 2hr 55 mins that we skied with the S6 logging this morning we did 9 runs for a paltry 3616m vertical at an average of 88m/min descent speed (288 m/min on one section of Pylones, a couple of 266's down to Mont Rosset, a 360 followed by a 267 and a 282 on the Princess Black. We did a further 2 runs of 1582m in the afternoon at the reduced average speed of 43m/min (to accomodate Helena); I managed to get a 261 m/min descent for one section of the race course, which wasn't too bad. Note that these descent speed figures are purely the rate of change of altitude they aren't actual speed of progress figures; for that you need to input the slope angle for each slope - something that's not that practical if you're just skiing around and is intended for speed training on a single slope - I need to read up on some more of the functionality when I get a moment...