As I mentioned last week, we’ve just got back from a week in Saas-Fee with Warren Smith. We’ve did this course last year as well, but due to the way the course is structured this didn’t really matter much; for us this year’s course built on last year’s. The aim of the course is to develop the skills required to ski the whole mountain, regardless of conditions and terrain…
There were around 20 of us on the course and instruction was done in one large group.
Looks like it’s going to rain today…
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The 2004/05 ski season starts for us in mid September when we’re off to Saas Fee with Warren Smith again. Today we got our boots out and spent some time stomping around and practicing some of the jumping exercises that Warren had us do last time. We both have different boots to the last time we skied with Warren and they’re more flexible and should work better with the kind of stuff he has us do.
We managed to get in two skate sessions this weekend, which was nice. The weather was lovely and on Saturday we spent some time at Kensington Gardens. This was our third skate this year and we finally started to feel we’d got our legs back. On Sunday we were in Ilford, visiting my family, and just happened to have the skate gear in the car… We skated in Valentines Park for an hour or so; it was good.
Those of you who are interested in the Warren Smith Saas Fee ski training sessions you might like to take a look at Warren’s latest DVD, Warren Smith Ski Academy Lesson 2. The first two sections, carving and steeps, were filmed during our course in September 2003. As you can see, the snow was pretty good and, as I said at the time, he had us doing some pretty interesting stuff.
My birthday lasted all week, which was good. I celebrated on the day at Strada in upper street, on Friday at the Almeida and on Saturday at Curry Special.
Thanks for all the wonderful presents. Right now the most “interesting” is probably the Vew-Do balance board that Chris and Hilary bought me… I’d really noticed a big improvement in my skiing from the extra balance work that I’d done during the summer on roller blades.
We’ve just booked up with the Warren Smith Ski Academy again for another week of training in Saas-Fee. Not until early next season though :( But it’s the first trip booked… Now, where and when to go this season…
Today’s job is putting up the Christmas tree. That involves climbing around in our storage space “loft”. We didn’t use the tree last year, so it’s now got 2 year’s worth of stuff in front of it. I feel like I’m digging back through my past to get to it.
I’ve just pulled out my previous pair of skis. 2m+ Salomon Superforce 2S. Straight as a very straight thing. Towering a good 8 inches above me (I know… but I was young, and keen, and they were wonderful at the time).
I’ve been editing videos on a PC for far too long. It’s a lot easier than it used to be, but it still feels like it’s not quite ready for prime time for non professionals. At least it’s now reasonable easy to find room to store the masses of data that you need to manipulate when editing DV video, and the editing programs are better, and the special hardware is cheaper or no longer special.
The 2003/04 ski season has started. Well, for me at least. We spent the last week in Saas-Fee, Switzerland, in the hands of the Warren Smith Ski Academy. Great fun, hard work, highly recommended.
The snow was wonderful for the time of year. Much more like winter snow than spring skiing. Sure it was a bit hard first thing and a few slopes got a little sugary by midday but all in all we couldn’t have asked for better conditions.
