Effortless

This afternoon I skied with Peter and Val for the first time. They had only just arrived in Méribel last night, and were very excited to be here. At the start of the session I asked the important question, "What are your skiing goals for this holiday?". The answers came thick and fast. In summary they wanted to learn how to ski in control, without getting distracted, oh and to not get scared.

My philosophy with skiing is to try to keep things as simple as possible. We looked at positioning our bodyweight effectively down to the sweetspot of the ski. This helps with balance and speed control. I can't wait to ski with them again tomorrow morning where we will look at the quality of the turn.

I've also skied with Lisa twice this week. Lisa is currently experiencing a massive improvement purple patch with her skiing. Her control is visibly increasing daily. My job as an instructor is to try to find different words, phrases or descriptions of technique and psychology. And then find the appropriate pistes to practise. This morning she shouted out with a massive grin "Martin, it now feels effortless, this speed control is suddenly effortless, I don't believe it". "Great", I replied "So how can we trigger this and repeat it?". "I just need to remember the new 'f' word, effortless" replied Lisa. Earlier in the week I skied with Tim and Freddie.

After skiing miles and miles of normal pistes, they wanted further challenges. Off-piste with decent snow. With the current freezing temperatures and windy conditions, the best we could do was find light, fluffy skied out snow on steep off-piste gradients.

Freddie is an experienced piste skier, as is Tim who is also a fan of Heli-skiing in Canada.

We did our best with the conditions and relished practising in the different environment of off-piste compared to the prepared pistes.

The afternoon climaxed in the steep and magnificent 'Méribel Couloir' from the top of the Saulire peak as photographed above with Freddie skiing, and below with Tim. It's often very difficult to portray how steep a pitch is within a photograph. Believe me, most of the Méribel Couloir is STEEP.

Please notice that Freddie is proudly wearing his 'Coeur Blanc Challenge' silver and diamond encrusted badge from two winters ago, a veteran of the charity event.

The next Coeur Blanc is going ahead this Saturday, the 13th. I'm delighted to be guiding a team on this challenge again, called the Bump Bashers. Basically, each skier has to use all of the 53 lifts in the Méribel valley in a single day. Sounds easy, you must be joking. Please see website http://www.coeurblanc.eu/ for further details. The chosen charity this winter is for Melanoma Research. If you would like to make a kind contribution to this very worthy cause, then please follow this link, www.justgiving.com/bumpbashers

This will be one of the few times this winter where skiing will not involve the 'f' word, effortless. It will be knackering. I'll report on the event after the weekend.

Martin