MegèveSki

Lapland

Day two of our informal tuition. We started with a warm up under the quad, awesome snow, wonderful grooming... After that we headed over to Condor II and the conditions were, to be honest, shite in comparison. It was hard, chunky, snow that had been brutalised by the basher and left as a pile of solid rubble arranged in lines...

We did some exercises on the hard conditions, skiing with arms crossed, no poles and then skiing the same way with a jump mid turn... It would probably have been easy on the snow under the quad, on Condor it was painful... We then went all the way to the top and dropped back towards the sextuple, cutting across in a long traverse until we dropped down on the low drag lift.

The rest of the morning was spent lapping on the low drag lift. Julian stood in one place (he didn't get to work off lunch today ;) ) and we all lapped around on the drag. Each one of us got individual feedback each time we went around. It was a hard day, we all skied a lot and the exercises were challenging.

To start with I was doing carved turns and I was working on getting more (or some!) hip angulation. Apparently I was breaking at the waist rather than angulating from the hip. I started with some 'stepping up the hill during the turn in a skating style' exercises and, once I'd either failed dismally or got the hang of it (it was hard to tell, it was a hard exercise...), I was switched to stepping onto the inside edge of the new outside ski at the point where I changed edges. This one took me a fair while to get, it wasn't until I saw Phil doing the same thing that I realised that I was trying to do the stepping far too late. Once that seemed to work I was moved onto shorter turns with the same level of extension and hip crossover... Then the focus moved to making sure I was stood over the ski for the whole time rather than just at certain points (i.e. stop the damn backwards rocking at the end of the turn and don't drop in at the end either!!!). We did this for most of the day...

At some point, we had lunch, or Julian said we could have lunch.... The choice was, travel over to the usual lunch spot at Viento Cero or have lunch at the new restaurant at the end of the long drag... We did a couple of free runs in the steeper off-piste to the left of the longer drag and the decided that it was better to ski more and pay for lunch than not....

Lunch was good, for me it was a steak sandwich as good as at Lynch which was less surprising when Katie announced that she'd been recognised as a chocolate cake fiend by a waitress who had seen her at Lynch...

My runs on the off-piste were reasonable, I was aiming for something that flowed reasonably well and I got what I was after on the second run. I took the easier but more choppy and cut up route down the first face and then repeated it to attempt to get a better run that I could directly compare to the previous one... Second run was better, both runs were OK. Lunch was great ;)

More training in the afternoon. The lapping really works, if I could stay focused on what I needed to work on whilst on the drag lift rather than letting my mind wander then perhaps I'd get better results...

At the end of the day we took Princessa III to the top and then Phil and Katie did a 'plogh to plough-parallel' lesson (Phil missed a couple of days during the trainee instructor training week and so needed to catch up). After the lesson Katie and Phil had the private lesson with Julian and Neil and I skied off down the off-piste to skiers left of the tripple above the gondola. A quick left turn above the gondola led us down some nice off-piste and deposited us at the top of Pista 6...

Bump run home, as usual, not as hard work as it has been as the bumps had been flattened by the recent snow and it was pretty flat at the top. Legs were tired though and so I was very ready to stop by the time we did....

Today was hard work, lots of skiing and the fact that we were skiing off of a drag meant that we were standing up all day... Still, the exercises worked well and I think we all really started to feel when we were doing it (whatever our personal version of 'it' was...) right... Once you start to feel the new it, it becomes easier to move towards the new level of performance...

One more day of practice, then a day of rest and then we go at it for real...