Things are getting a bit more serious now as we head towards the exams next week. Our instructor for this week is another Canadian lady, Jo. She too is a very experienced instructor, who when she's not instructing seems to work at the hospital and plays ice jockey! She also seems to have had the most injuries including bust knees, a broken back and lose of depth perception. Not that any of that slowed her down much!
The focus this week is on teaching and learning how to do wedges correctly. There are a series of steps in the Canadian teaching system which roughly go as; introduce yourself, assess the class, warm up ski, assess the ski level, introduce drills to improve them, reassess and then integrate knowledge into normal skiing. We tried a little bit of teaching to get a feeling for it, and the general feeling was pretty nerve racking.
As part of the qualification we need to be able to take a complete beginner all the way to doing parallels so we need to be able to do wedge (or snowplough) turns. This isn't easy when its been years since you last had to do them. So we went through the steps and concentrated on getting the weight over the outside ski and the correct pivot of the foot. Being able to do this all correctly in the wedge builds a base for when you go back to doing parallel, if you carry the correct feeling across then you will be in the correct position in the parallel turns. I think I learnt quite a bit doing this so I didn't mind doing it, however most of the rest of the group weren't happy as we stuck doing this on the green runs when there was good powder conditions.
We had some instruction about beginners, including how to explain how to put on skis and how to explain how to move around in them. We even went over to the magic carpet area and did some drills in with the learner groups so we could see what issues they have and a bit of learning to detect issues in others.
This week's focus on my technique was getting the feeling of falling down the hill (sounds weird but it means getting far enough over the ski to have good control) on the steeps (making me commit to the turns), more turning the ankle to edge, so much so my ankles were getting sore by the end of the week (really the only niggle apart from being knackered all the time).
Also another fun thing we did was one ski skiing. We left one ski at the top of the Cat Skinner chair and then went down Easy Out on one ski. The idea, switching skiing foot several times, is learn to a turn, left or right depend which foot the ski is on, using just the one edge and not cheating by using the other ski. This helped in two ways; one to get the idea on balancing on one ski, as you should do normally, and two to rediscover the feeling on being out of control on skis so we know how the beginners feel :). Also we tried to turn both ways on one ski, which is a level two skill, we were quiet a sight to see with legs and arms all over the place.
One piece of information from Jo that really helped me this week was the idea of the 10 percents of turning. Basically think of the turn in 10% blocks and have the various acts of turning broken up between them. So get the balance and pivot and edge all working through the whole turn smoothly rather than going all full on edge just at the end. So make it all nice and smooth.
So now we have a couple of days to get our heads together and revise the detail, then it's time for the exams!! (actually the weather at the weekend was nice enough to get a bit of a tan and a few people like Kieran to do some T-shirt skiing!)
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