I’ve always tried to get the edge on my ski buddies by escaping for a weeks pre season skiing and had often been tempted by the Race Training weeks offered by Snoworks. I’d run out of excuses as to why I “wasn’t ready yet” and booked myself in for 6 days of ‘recreational slalom training’ (now there’s three words that seem unhappy sharing the same title) in Tignes.
Just to save you having to read the last page backwards to get to the punch line of this story, here’s a question for you. Why can you never really stay in a ski teachers tracks ? Because they do completely different things with their skis than we do. Well not any more they don’t !
That Tignes stands out as a ‘year round’ ski resort is no accident. The ‘management’ have made significant investments in the resorts facilities and promote it as an all year, all sport facility. As well as playing host to most of the worlds ski teams, national football squads and Olympic teams also use the resort for off season and altitude training. Training facilities including the amazing new Aquatonic Centre are open all year, albeit at some strange times off-season. And for the benefit of anyone who’s given the resort a miss for a few years, I’m happy to report that the diggers and cranes have left, the tunnel is finished and there are now more varied domiciles than you could shake a stick at. Viewed by many as the poor relation to it’s more glitzy other half, Val D’Isere, Tignes has really come of age with a lot to offer.
My fears that I would be at the ‘sloth’ end of the weeks participants were proved unfounded at the welcome evening at the excellent hotel Terril Blanc which sits on the edge of the lake, a five minute bus ride from Val Claret centre and the Funicular base station. Certainly the expected smattering of BASI 2’s, 3’s and junior race coaches were there, as was a Canadian level 2 instructor, vying for BASI 1. But there were also a good number of casual skiers just who’d come to see what it was all about, and not all of them the right side of 60.
Snoworks founder Phil Smith has a number of shining attributes. Other than a continually evolving hair style, he has an unnerving ability to instantly memorise 12 people’s names and give them all clear and specific feedback after one run. He can also make a long explanation very short and very telling. His frustration at ski teaching that focuses on specific body positions rather than efficient and effective movements was eloquently summarised. “Skiing is about free movements, it’s supposed to be a sport not a demonstration. Next time you’re on a chair lift, look at all the ski teachers and the skiers who look good. Only a few of them are really skiing, most of them are just demonstrating some body position they learned”.
Splitting the week’s candidates into “the not quite so fast” and the “I have no respect for my mortality” groups was done by self appraisal with Phil leading the former and the human ‘Pocket Rocket’ Mark Jones taking the other. That the first two days activities were away from the race course due to poor visibility and nearly 18 inches of fresh snow was frustrating at the time, but the lessons learned on piste were invaluable later and there are (with the benefit of hindsight) only so many days in a week when your legs can endure the kind of ‘G’ forces best left to formula one drivers.
The mark of a good teacher is often the subtlety with which they get their message across, and Mr Smith is a master. If you didn’t get the point using one exercise, he had a dozen others to reinforce it, each building on the other, often pushing you to the wrong end of the scale in order to recognise the benefit of being at the right end. By the end of each session, the lesson had been drilled into your brain without feeling like someone had beaten a hole in your head to get it there. You understood it, knew what it felt like and started to get an overall picture of the elements of fast skiing and how they worked together. Phil describes the “four Strands” of race training as: tactical, technical, psychological and physical. “By the time clients get here I can’t do anything about their physical condition, they’re ready or they’re not. The element that trips most people up and stops them realising their potential is psychological. It’s the same for world cup racers as it is for recreational skiers. If they’re not emotionally comfortable, they won’t ski fast. My job is to make them comfortable with their ability to perform the technical elements and show them how to approach their skiing with the correct tactics so that they are more comfortable emotionally”.
The major technical elements Phil focuses on for fast skiing are using edge angle and pressure to create the turn radius, using turn length to control direction and NOT using any rotation. Ever. Everything else was just fine tuning the way you combine these elements to control speed and direction. The tactics of using these elements in differing conditions to get the desired results were certainly practiced on the hill but really emphasised during the evening de-brief and video analysis sessions. These sessions were as relaxed as they had to be in the party atmosphere of the pre-dinner/après-ski sessions in the hotel bar, but were where a lot of ideas gelled and a lot of faces reddened as the indisputable video evidence of their (relative) ineptitude was aired in public. A humiliating but very valuable experience.
Day three and another nine inches of fresh snow had fallen overnight. The early reports were of howling gales at the top, but a strongly fancied forecast of a break in the weather had Phil and Mark up at first light and driving up to for the funicular before the STGM bus drivers had finished their tea. Braving the face crushing fracas that is the queue for the days first Grand Motte train, Phil (in his own words) “out excuse et moi’d” the French contingent to the front of the line and made the seat by the front door of the front carriage his own. The scramble from the mid station to the Lesse resembled the mass start of a cross country sprint but Smith waged on, skating like a man possessed and, brushing aside the attentions of a curiously moustached Swiss race coach, thrust the Ski Company start gate into position number one on the 3500 piste. The Brits had done it again, crushing Johnnie foreigner in his own back yard, ah the sweet deodorant of victory ! Now it may only seem like a small thing to you, but to the uninitiated, the maze of gates in a single slalom course can be a confusing thing. Having our course hemmed in by yet more gates on either side could lead to terminal confusion, and the possible spectre of the English beginner getting irretrievable entwined with a course full of national B team and club racers was too grim to contemplate.
As they “didn’t want to kill anyone”, our leaders set a course that was more GS than slalom. Not fast enough to bring on any aneurisms and not twisty enough to break anyone’s legs ! We side-slipped the course a few times to get an idea of the layout then had a few practice runs. Another group side-slip to iron out the ruts that had already transformed our nice flat course into a bob sleigh run then a few final words of wisdom from our team captains and it was time for the real thing. Brakes off, leave your brains at the start gate and just go for it. Well, that’s what it felt like, but the evidence of the video that evening revealed a more pedestrian reality that gave an invaluable point of reference. Everyone went out the next day knowing that what had felt fast - and was probably as fast as they’d ever skied - didn’t look fast, and certainly wasn’t fast enough. And that’s how it was for the next three days. You get to the start gate and radio down to Phil or Mark to let them know you’re ready. A few minutes later they give you the OK to go and you take your run down. At the bottom, the instructor helps you to your feet and/or makes a few suggestions then sends you on your way the last hundred meters to the drag lift that pulls you back alongside and to the top of the course and round you go again.
Time evaporates like sweat through Gore-Tex. You don’t get to speak to anyone much and when you do they’re so deep in thought they rarely respond. With your mind transfixed with mental rehearsal and the immense mental and physical effort required for each run, the boredom you might imagine is a million miles away. This was really skiing and skiing really fast. Blasting down a wide piste making turns as and when you please is one thing, skiing a race course is just not the same. If you’re doing everything right, you don’t scrub off speed, ever. Every turn properly executed generates more speed. The gradient of our course was cunningly engineered to get steeper the further down you got and you had to turn when the gates told you to, not when you felt like it. Well, you didn’t have to, but if you got the line wrong into some of the lower gates, the speed you were travelling at combined with the two foot deep ruts (I kid you not) would launch you into Elvis’s back garden. It’s a great way to focus your attention. On a race course you have to ski this fast. The same velocity on a normal piste would have your pants running away in terror.
The changeable weather and varying visibility really bought home the benefits of one pre-gates lesson. ‘Focus switching’ Phil called it. When visibility is bad you can still see, you just can’t see far ahead. But if you look at what you can see and learn to process and react to it, you can make good progress in most condition. Continually focus switching when skiing fast, switching your visual focus and mental processing between close (the bump you’re just about to hit) and distant (the next gate you’re aiming for) lets you keep planning ahead without being launched into oblivion by things you didn’t spot in time. Why do so many skiers take crushing falls in perfect visibility with no idea why they fell? Because they were looking way ahead in the distance just because they could see way ahead, and not processing any information about what was about to rip their skis off.
The last day arrived and with it, the bluest of blue skies. It was race day. Against the clock, against everyone else but mostly against yourself. Had the technical elements been absorbed? did you have the right tactics? were you emotionally prepared for this? and would your pathetic physical conditioning hold out for just a few more runs? Only the clock would tell, and it would tell the truth. Fast skiers had got faster and more aggressive all week. Confidence had often exceeded competence with very messy consequences. Meek, quite spoken people had become snarling monsters. Speed, that’s all that mattered. We were to get two practice runs then two runs against the clock. There were no video cameras today, just clipboards, stop watches and serious expressions. My first practice run was a disaster but the frustration fired me up and I flew on the second. Just to put things in perspective, as I was coming up on the drag lift I saw the human Pocket Rocket flying down the course. Wearing his ankle length anorak, he had no poles, a clipboard in one hand, a cheese sandwich in the other and he melted my tracks with disrespectful speed!
My first timed run was OK but I knew I’d had to put the brakes on to stay on line half way down, but my last run of the week was a peach. Everything came together. I saw every bump and undulation, held the edges and modulated pressure to avoid being deflected off my line. The edge angles felt like I was carving trenches with my hips and my 9S’s railed with blissful nonchalance. Not a hint of skid anywhere, just the crisp whisper of steel cutting through snow. I screamed defiance at every gate and the skis just laughed at the simplicity of it all. It was over - - - - OK I know, but you just can’t describe these things clinically you know!
I was second fastest of our group. Two of our group were faster than skiers in Marks “I may die soon” group and two of the fast group were deemed good enough to have a gnats chance of passing the European speed test that many were ultimately training for. The clock had told its story, but everyone had their own. Many remarked that the process had improved their skiing far beyond expectations. Not only in pure speed, but in the efficiency and accuracy that they took off piste and through mogul fields throughout the week. We had started skiing and stopped trying to demonstrate the techniques and body positions we had all been taught previously. Mission accomplished Mr Smith.
No, I’m not on Snoworks payroll. I’ll admit that I didn’t pay for this trip, but by the time you read this I’ll be polishing my skis in preparation for this year’s race training which I will be paying for very happily. If you want to put a big punctuation mark in your skiing story, you could do a lot worse than do the same. See you there.
Martin Jeffries / Tignes, Race |
