ISIA performance training course - Days 1 and 2

Day 0 - Sunday 23/2/14

Off to a flying start when only four of us turned up to the pre course meeting, and not even the trainer appeared to meet us, even the ski school where the meeting was to take place did not know there was a course on this week, hmmmmmm. Let's just hope that tomorrow we are actually meeting at Medran at 9am.

Day 1 - Monday 24/2/14 - CLARITY, Physicality, Intensity

First off we discovered why the meeting did not happen last night, our trainer was only told on Sunday morning that he was running this course, and that 4, not 6 people were on it.  So BASI admin standards up to normal then!

However, our trainer is great.  Very experienced and happy to answer any question no matter how stupid or complicated it may be.  And this was great for me as I have plenty of stupid questions to ask.  Currently I am still trying to process what the correct inputs are in terms of movement and separation, predominantly because I have been trained to understand and do one thing, which is in fact, not correct, and until now I have not questioned it.  The positive of this is that I am now questioning it, and starting to understand it more.

Our main focus today was piste performance, shorts in the morning, longs in the afternoon.  We were mainly looking at making sure the task was clear, keeping the skis changing direction all the time, and rotational and lateral separation.

Not only did I learn lots, I felt the correct movements starting to come through.  It was a very busy day on the pistes though.

Day 2 - Tuesday 25/2/14 - keep the skis changing direction all of the time

Today we headed to Bruson where it was the busiest I've seen it, but still quiet in comparison to Verbier.  The morning was spent doing carving 'long turns' down a black run.  This was a bit of an eye opener for me as I was expecting to carve down red runs only!  When I focused on the task and really went for it, it went well, but my goodness it was fast.

After lunch the focus changed to short turns, and my performance slowly got worse and worse.  All of my old habits came back until I pretty much gave up all together.  It is definitely true that if you focus on the task and the aim you do it, and I think I have the skills to do it, but for some reason the focus just wasn't there.

So, a mixed day with two runs of variables at the end and despite the mixed success I finished super psyched for training tomorrow, I'm going to try hard, train hard and ski hard too.