MegèveSki

New coach

We have a new coach for the next two weeks, Blair Aitken who's an ex national team racer. Today we skied the morning outside of the gates and Blair got a feel for what we could do and what we wanted. This week there are two new guys, Barry and Crystal and three of us from last week, Gina, Dave and me. Since all of us are BASI 3 (though many are almost BASI 2) Blair has switched into full on BASI speak to communicate what he wants from us, this seems to be working well. Also some of the guys are more focused on getting their BASI 2 tech exam (the skiing bit) than actual slalom racing so part of the focus for today was to get us doing clean short turns to the BASI 2 level which involves a clean carve with added lower leg rotational steering to tighten and control the shape of the turn. Once we'd worked on our short turns we did a couple of runs in some stubbies and had some video taken for later analysis. The day went well and the smaller group allowed for lots of personal feedback on our performance. My skiing seemed better today, I was much more centred than I have been, these skis seem good for that as you really don't want to get in the back seat with them...

After the ski day ended we had video analysis at the Alpaka and then serviced our skis. Blair had told us his views on ski tuning during the day and he'd mentioned that he was a firm believer in having a 0.5 degree base edge bevel to allow for easy turn control. Earlier in the week, Phil had sent me details of how my new skis were set up from the factory (base bevel of 0.5 degree and side angle of 3 (87) degrees). Since I also happened to have a 0.5 degree base file guide that I'd never used and I'd been avoiding touching my base edges last week I decided to take the plunge and do the base edges to 0.5 and keep my sides at 88 as that's what I'd been doing them at and the lower angle stays sharper longer... I also decided to wax them and since they're new and have yet to be waxed enough I waxed and scraped them twice... I've been told that new skis should be waxed and scraped around 10 times to get them nice and fast (then you can just resort to a single waxing each time...) so I need to find time to give them a good waxing...

Today was good, Blair is a very enthusiastic coach and with the smaller group size (last week there were 8 of us) we got more feedback than last week.