Spring has sprung!

Wow it's got hot over here this week, spring is in the air!

After a big snow week last week, (check out these photos from Darren Stevenson, one of last weeks Advanced BC riders) the weather has changed and spring conditions have arrived.

Fresh lines down the Grandes Envers - Valley Blanche


Cameron slashes a nice bank, Col du Beaugean

Deep snow for Andy, Plan d' Aiguille

This week we have a BC Intro group with Seb and I have a Custom style week with Gillian and Neil, 2 skiers that won a 'The North Face' competition and obviously got the booby prize of a week with Neil McNab.

Last Friday when we did the Col du Beaugean I took out my skis for the first time since mid December just to have a quick warm up and to see if I could still do it. I need not have worried as it all came back straight away, skiing is of course pretty easy what with having boards on both feet and poles to push around with and we scored perfect powder down the Beaugean.

This last 2 days I've been out skiing the pistes at Le Tour and today Fleger and Brevent doing a bit of ski teaching which I haven't done for about 20 years. I have to say I've really enjoyed skiing for a bit of a change and its good to be able to blast around in the spring slush at full speed throwing in some big wide stanced racing style carves all over the hill. I've been playing around trying to take the same lines that I would on my board, skidding the tails out on lips and making cut backs on banks, blasting through the slushy bumps and generally catching up on a life times skiing in 2 days!

I've been using my Snowboard technique philophosy for skiing using the McNab pressure control system to use the four corners of each ski and it works great. Tweak the back of the ski to jet pressure forwards along the top edge before rolling to the front corner on the turning edge and then driving the presure back along the edge through the foot from toes to heel to power the back again. Great for powerful carves and powerfull short radius turns on the steeps. Feels amazing after all a ski is designed the same as a board so it follows that they should work the same you just have 2 of them!

Gillian and Neil don't like to stop so much and so I've had to eat lunch on the chair and we've been at it non stop from morning straight through until the end of the day.

Luckily I saved some energy for a power squats and leg work session to build the power up for the cycling and even started hanging on my bouldering wall again a little bit. Did a campus session yesterday evening, the first of the winter so I'll see if my tendonitis has finally heeled and hopefully I can get back on it.

I'm going to swap with Seb tomorrow and head out for a bit of a tour with the BC Intro boys, maybe a Grandes Autannes!

All good,

Neil.