Better Skiing - Chapter 1 - Ski Equipment and Fitness.

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1 - BASIC CONSIDERATIONS - Part A

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REVERSE CAMBER ETC.
RELEASE BINDINGS
BOOTS
POLES
FITNESS

EQUIPMENT- THE SKI

To become a better skier, it does help to know a little about the ski, how it works, and how to get the best out of it. It has been around for four thousand years, give or take a year or two, and has come a long way since the one found in a Scandinavian bog.

It is now a sophisticated machine, and you have probably gathered that the companies making skis are intensely competitive. This means that year on year there is always some interesting technical innovation, and quite often a quantum leap in actual performance. At the time of writing shorter, fatter skis are all the rage. There is even a model out there that has winking tip lights. I’ve no idea where it will end, and I’m not going to discuss in detail the intricacies of a ski’s construction - these would fill a book on their own, but it is important to have a basic knowledge of how and why skis work the way they do.

What kind of skis will you need to improve your skiing? The last few years have seen a great leap forward in ski design. Gone are the recreational skis that had to be as long as as your outstretched arm above your head. The optimum length nowadays is anything from 5cm (2in) smaller than you are to 5cm taller than you are as a general rule. So clever is the design that they will grip on ice, go relatively fast, and float through powder. They should be lively and moderately stiff, perhaps 5cm taller than you are, and with the bases and edges in excellent condition. If you have been stuck in a rut for years and have moved onto these shorter wider skis, you should have noticed some improvement although they will not be suitable for really fast work. The main thing is to try different pairs out and experiment with them.

If you decide to hire or buy from a shop, make sure you go in a quiet time. If you go when the shop is busy, the guy in charge of the skis will look you up and down, and judging by the look on your face, ie: pure terror or cool omniscience, will thrust a pair of skis at you without further ado. Ask the people in the shop for advice. Tell them you are an aggressive skier, and want a pair of performance skis with a bit of welly in them. Hire departments in ski shops have improved dramatically over the years, so you will probably be better off hiring them if you are only skiing for a week or two. If you are lucky enough to be spending a season in the mountains, dig deep, splash out, and buy some - after taking advice you can trust, or trying out a similar pair of course.

How do you know what to get? If you are trying a pair of skis out from the ski shop, or from a friend, take a good look at them first. Look at the bottoms. Are the plastic soles nice and smooth, and free from holes and gouges? The edges should be sharp and smooth with no pit marks in them. They could have been battered by countless previous hirers so test them to see if they have any life left in them. Do this by putting them together, sole to sole, and squeezing them with one hand at the mid point just behind the front binding. There should be a good gap and a certain springiness when you squeeze and let go. Technicians will say there is more to testing a ski in the shop than this, but if there is no gap and no springiness, there ain’t much life left in the old thing. To get a better feel you can make some comparisons with some old battered pairs.

The base of the ski needs to be flat without being warped or twisted. Shut one eye and look down the length of the ski to check that it is flat. (Shutting one eye makes you look more professional than keeping both open.) Although the ski remains flat at rest it should have a built in capacity to twist in movement (called torque), but that does not interest us here.

Remember, do talk to the people in the shop and let them know that you that you need an all terrain ski that is going to be worked hard; they will let you try out pairs until you find what suits you, as long as you pay for the hire of course! Remember though that you will have to work hard to get the best out of good performance skis, and develop the technique to match, so read on!

REVERSE CAMBER ETC.

Let’s just think about how the ski works. It is quite a strange shape really. The pointed bit at the front is turned up and the reason for that is fairly obvious, but why does the ski (viewed horizontally from the side), bend up towards the middle, and why is it wider at the front and the back than in the middle?

There are three words to mull over here, and they are ‘camber’, 'sidecut', and ‘reverse camber’. Take a new ski down from the rack in the ski shop and put it flat on the floor. It doesn’t have to have a safety binding on it at this stage, and you don’t really have to do this in the ski shop if you are shy, so just imagine you are doing it. Lay the ski down on the flat floor. The middle is perhaps three quarters of an inch off the ground. Gingerly, push it down with a finger and let it go quickly; it will bounce up. This is the springiness in it - just like you after paying eight weeks in advance for your ski holiday. This upward bend in the ski is known as camber. Now look at the ski from above. It is narrower in the middle than at the tip and the tail. This is known as the sidecut. Now the combination of the camber and the sidecut produces the real goody - the potential for reverse camber. Those of you who know all about this are welcome to skip it. In my view it is fundamental to better skiing.

Imagine you are standing still across the fall line on a perfectly smooth steep slope. Your lower ski is in the air because you have lifted your lower leg. Lowering the ski horizontally to the slope, the first parts of the sole to touch the snow will be the tip and the tail. The middle of the ski will not be touching yet because of the camber - the bend upwards. If you lower your leg further and push the middle of the ski further down, it will only be touching the slope along the whole of its edge after you have bent it past the straight position into the opposite arc or camber. The distance you can bend it before the whole edge touches depends on the amount of sidecut. The downward arc that the ski now describes is called reverse camber. It is under tension like a spring, not a lot, but more than you did it in the shop because in the shop you had the ski flat, and now you have it on its edge. If you now start moving forwards down the slope with just the ski on its edge, it will automatically curve over the snow because of the sidecut and the reverse camber. Do you understand this? If you don’t then try reading it again until you do. It is a very important bit of theory.

We will discuss this later, but it will soon be possible to achieve added reverse camber by applying more pressure at the right time thereby producing the sort of turn we can only dream about.

Various combinations of stiffness and sidecut determine the type of ski it is. For example, a special slalom ski, designed to do tight turns, will have more sidecut and be stiffer to give more spring than a giant slalom ski designed for longer turns and general recreational skiing. I have not mentioned how length affects the skis’ performance - mainly because you probably know already.

Generally speaking, the longer the ski the faster it will go. It will also be more difficult to turn, especially at slower speeds. At high speed a longer ski will be much more stable than a short one, and become easier to turn the faster it goes. Having said that, the longest skis of all at 240cm, used for speed skiing, are almost impossible to turn with very little sidecut and no camber - a sixty mile an hour snowplough seems the most effective way to change direction on these monsters.

Summarising all this, the conclusion is that a good pair of skis have the potential to work for you as long as you are prepared to put the work into them.

RELEASE BINDINGS

These have come a long way since the bone snapping bear traps of the fifties and now we hardly think about them. Anyway, they have become so sophisticated that you need to be a rocket scientist to understand the technicalities.

I must confess that I could always tell you the name of the ski I was on, but would be often hard pressed to tell you the name of the binding that was doing such a wonderful job holding me on and letting me go with such precision. There are times, however, when they may let you down - usually because they have not been adjusted properly.

There has been a standardised din setting for all makes of binding for many years now so that the numbers on the dials of every make mean the same regardless of the make of binding. They can be adjusted to suit the weight and expertise of a skier - the higher the number the heavier and/or better the skier - generally. They should be tightened so that within a reasonable margin they will both hold the skier onto the skis and then let him go when necessary. The back binding releases to prevent him from breaking his leg, and the front one releases to prevent him twisting his knee ligaments. For reasons I won’t bother with here, a safe back binding was quite easy to perfect, while a safe front binding was more difficult. This is why there are far fewer broken legs than twisted knee ligaments today. I say that generally bindings should be adjusted to suit the weight of a skier, but his standard and the speed he skis, and the terrain he is skiing on can also be considered.

What I recommend here is that whoever adjusts the skis for you in the shop is aware of your weight and adjusts the bindings accordingly. If they then pre-release and come off when you haven’t even made a mistake, check to see whether the back or front one is responsible. If it was the back one it will have opened, and if it was the front one then the back will still be closed. You can usually borrow a screwdriver from the man in the lift hut - don’t expect anyone else to do it for you unless you are very attractive and they don’t mind being sued if you have have a bad accident as a result of a maladjusted binding. Tighten in half clicks until the binding stops pre-releasing. The harder you ski the higher you will need the settings, but always crank up in small increments.

There will sometimes be occasions when the bindings do pre-release in such unusual circumstances that you will know that there is not really a need to do anything about them. Such a thing happened to me about five years ago, when we were skiing in the sun down good hard pack snow. I decided to hang left on to a path out of the sun, and hit it a bit too fast. It was classic ice, hard as rock and bumpy like a ship’s bottom and I knew I was in trouble. There was a sharp left turn about fifty yards down but before I was anywhere near it my right ski came off and this was the one I really needed for a left hand turn. I just about got the uphill one to start turning but I couldn’t cope with the bumpy ice and hit the lip on the outside of the bend at about thirty miles an hour. Nothing was visible on the other side except the far valley a mile away. At the moment of launch my left ski stopped dead on the upward lip and I flew out of it. I described a perfectly executed parabola about twenty feet above the ground at its highest point with just my boots on, and landed on all fours twenty yards from the bend in soft snow. The people coming up in the gondolas just a few feet away must have really enjoyed themselves.

BOOTS

There are a few things to mention about boots and you probably know about them already. They should be comfortable and hold your heel firmly. If they don't hold your heel firmly you will have to move that much more before the ski does, and you will want them to react instantaneously to your every command. Your toes should have a little movement so that the blood continues to circulate. There is nothing more depressing than taking your boots off at the end of the day, not having felt any sensation in your toes since lunch time, and finding that all your toes have turned black. It is sensible therefore to have your own boots as everybody’s feet are different; even your own left foot is different from your own right foot. Foam filled customised boots are now the rage so splash out with a load more greenbacks. Go for the most expensive you can afford and they could last a lifetime. I have had my faithful old Salomon SX95Es for sixty three years now and there’s not a mark on them........

There is still a difference in the stiffness of the boot’s outer shell between recreational and competition models. Don’t be afraid to go for the highest quality boot you are comfortable with; it will probably feel strange in the shop. Spend a lot of time choosing and clumping around with both boots on. Remember you are going to have to do a lot of walking as well, and not just to the ski lift and back from the bar. By the time you have finished this book you and the mountains will have become one. This means that you may have dispensed with the lift system and will be climbing on foot with a large rucksack and a long beard.

POLES

More seriously, you can actually use any old rubbish when it comes to poles as long as they are the same length, roughly the same light weight, and have some sort of basket. I have always considered trendy looking, expensive poles as a complete waste of money. The way you are going to be skiing shortly means that you will be bending, breaking, and doubtless losing lots of poles. Most shops will probably throw the poles in with whatever you are buying; you will then be able to spend that much more on your boots.

There is, however, one important thing to remember about poles. Get some that are slightly shorter than the recommended length for your height. This will improve what is known as your anticipation, and will encourage you to get down lower at the appropriate time. Get them about two inches shorter, and if the assistant in the shop looks at you in a strange fashion, say they are for your little sister, who is two inches smaller than you.

There are several other factors to consider before setting out on the road to Damascus. You may be familiar with some of them, and if you are aware of them all now, the heavy practical stuff will be that much easier to handle later on.

FITNESS

It doesn’t involve a great deal of effort for someone who has been skiing for ages to get off on blue runs for a week doing sloppy turns and listening to their I-Pod. Please don’t think I have anything against sloppy turns; it’s just that if you are going to become a better skier, you must be able to do some precision turns as well, and this does involve effort!

Fitness then is obligatory. You don’t have to be pumping ninety kilos on the pec deck and running seven minute miles with a lump of lead strapped to each ankle, but it is a good idea to complete a regular and disciplined programme before you go off into the blue white yonder or Scotland etc.

You should do something to increase your aerobic capacity, ie your puff, and some anaerobic work to improve your leg, thigh, and stomach muscles. Running up and down hills, or just walking hard up and down them, is good for both puff and strength. If you can’t always do this, a course at the gym on weights, combined with the aerobic machines, would be a good plan.

If you already have your own methods stick to them; there’s nothing worse than doing recommended exercise that you hate when you have adequate alternatives of your own. Golf and speed chess, however, are not much use. It’s worth remembering that for all the work you do getting fit, the first day or two at six thousand feet may make you feel that the effort has been wasted. Fear not. The effort will be worth it; just think of how you will feel with all those little red blood cells coursing through your veins the first morning back at the office.

I know I’m being a spoil sport now, but try not to drink too much alcohol while lunching on the mountain. It may do wonders for your relaxed mental attitude, which I mention again, but it will very quickly nullify any physical fitness, and combined with your new aggressive attitude to skiing may turn you into something very dangerous. Being breathalysed on a ski slope could also be quite embarrassing. Of course there are exceptions; if the weather has turned foul there is nothing better than getting legless in a cosy mountain restaurant with good company, a blizzard raging outside, and a ride down in the cable car just as the moon comes up.....

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GLOSSARY

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CHAPTER 1B