Just Hit It! – ‘The Slalom Problem’- Part 4

I missed a training session last week as I was not feeling right.

The water sprayers were on sending a fine mist not so much over the plastic mats but into my glasses. Rossendale ski club is on a steep hill in the Pennines. It was misty in the distance at the top of the other side of the valley I noted before I set off down the piste.

This week the race ‘track’ [is it a track? It’s not a piste is it as it is on a piste…] was complicated and swung out wide here and there. ‘Offset’ the trainer called it.

The trainer was pretty silent this week. He made no comment whatsoever about my skiing.

I did not know what to do so asked some of my fellow skiers. You kind of want some feedback. He’s probably concentrating on the younger kids. Some are only 7 years old.

So my fellow skier said ‘Just concentrate on one thing and focus on that’. We decided that I should lift my inside ski, which forces all the pressure on the outside ski. Which is how they used to teach skiing way back in the 80s before parabolic skis [based on snowboard technology I think] were invented.

In those days racing skis could be over two metres in length and pretty much straight skis. Now they are 40 cm shorter and very curved!

Anyway, as a result of ‘just lifting the inside ski’ something interesting started to happen: The gates were in the way.

These gates, blue and red telling you which side to pass, are on springs. If you hit them they bounce away from you, hopefully. If they don’t they can hit you in the face, which is why most slalom racers have a safety bar on the front of their helmets like an American footballer.

So the gates were now in the way. What to do?

I ask another fellow trainee, Cal, who is a master in slalom. ‘Just hit the gate with the nearest hand and don’t think about it too much. If you start thinking the gate will already have passed and you will not get round the next gate’.

Another skier said ‘I think three gates ahead. I am thinking where I am going to turn way before I do’.

This was a lot to take in. Being a trained ski teacher I know it is best to focus on one thing at a time [something we should take into our general lives!]. So, hit with the nearest hand, I decided, and to look two gates ahead.

My skis were going considerably faster with their newly applied wax. So things were coming at me quicker.

‘Just hit it!’ shouted Cal. So I did.

It felt good knocking down those poles. They make a lovely clicking noise and the good skiers have a perfect rhythm so it sounds like a metronome.

After a few runs the wax had gone off the base of my skis, slowing down my skis.

Chatting to another skier, he takes two pairs, a rough one to warm up, another pair to do just three runs on the race course. I have another pair of skis [in fact I have two] so I can do the same.

Now I am going to have to prepare not one pair of skis each week but two! Fitness and ski sharpening soon!