Today I didn’t have a carpool (it was Josh’s day off) so I took the bus to work. They were supposed to change the schedule today to add a few earlier and later buses, but that didn’t happen. The bus driver told me they wouldn’t until the end of the week. I knew it couldn’t get me there on time so I called ahead to explain the situation and say I’d be about ten minutes late.
When I arrived I ran to the locker room and changed within a minute, including moving all the stuff I needed between my pockets. I have learned to change clothes so quickly I can be a runway model! I checked in on the computer at 0903 and saw that they are still doing line-ups for all the children at the bottom, so I was less than five minutes late for it.
Of course I didn’t have a class assigned to me because I’d already phoned in to say I’d be late but would be willing to shadow again. I helped a pretty blonde named Bonnie get her kids ready, and explained a lot of the forms and protocol to her. She’s a rookie here too and I don’t know how they gave her a class without even briefing her on these things. While waiting around I chatted with the kids, and Alicia (the same person who let me sleep on her floor, was supervising today) said I could shadow that class if I wanted. We started to go and discovered one of the three kids forgot her lift pass. I took her back to get it, and was told there was a training group forming up on the mountain looking for interested skiers. I took the kid up the gondola and chairlift and regrouped her with her group, then skied down quickly to get to the training.
The ski clinic doesn’t pay anything for me (I don’t even get a free lunch) but it counts towards my 7.5 required hours of “additional training” for the season. I’m not sure what they do if someone chooses not to do any training. Anyway Bonnie agreed I’d get more out of that than shadowing her. It was freezing cold in the uniforms, though it wasn’t even snowing... but the training itself was actually very useful. The guy running it asked if there was anything we wanted to work on and I said I need to improve my rotary movement because it is my weakest skill: out of balance, pressure, edge, and rotation. He seemed very happy that somebody already had something they wanted to work on, and focused on that for the training.
We did a few rather advanced exercises to integrate edge control with rotation, and to integrate flexion and extension (pressure) with lateral body movement when he saw that my extension was too sudden and "poppy," and too vertical. I’m pretty responsive to feedback and everyone had their own suggestions and things they wanted to try so we moved from one exercise to another fairly quickly. One tip I actually got from someone else in the class - after I explained the three things I’m trying to work on, and he watched me ski - was: "keep your legs the same."
"What do you mean by 'the same?'" I asked, and understood he meant that I should keep my knees in the same horizontal line and equidistant throughout the turns. When you turn, the outside ski actually has to move faster for them to stay in the same position relative to each other. Racers do not do that, and so their skis may slide back and forth relative to each other as if they are walking when they turn. I didn’t try enough to do that so it was harder for me to bring my skis around at the same time. When I tried to keep my knees in the same line I got more hip movement into the turn and it made a big difference in how it all felt. I remembered what it feels like to ski really well, with everything moving like it is meant to. It’s a great sense of accomplishment like I feel when I am "in the zone" at work rapidly solving problems and making progress on a project. It just feels really nice to ski that way too. I practiced some more on my own after lunch.
We concluded with lunch at noon and paid for it - I knew the one day I didn’t pack a sandwich... It was still pretty cold, and we’re not allowed to ski in uniform anyway, so I only did two runs before heading back home. They did open a couple of new runs today, so I tried one of those. Nobody else was home when I returned so I had the house all to myself! When people did come back home they ate a bit and left me alone in the living room. Some of them went out to a house party for which I was not invited. I played a cool video game all day long, and even late into the night.
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