Blogs

Previously published This article was previously published on megeveski.com when I took some time out to ski. An index of these pages can be found here. Today was the last day of the first block of 5 days of the Instructor training course. All of the groups skied together for some part of the day as this allowed the three trainers to ‘compare notes’ and ensures that we’re all assessed in the same way; when multiple trainers are working together it’s important that someone wouldn’t pass in one group and yet fail in another due to slight differences in the way the individual trainers handle the assessment.

Previously published This article was previously published on megeveski.com when I took some time out to ski. An index of these pages can be found here. Today we mostly worked on our piste performance along with some slightly steeper off piste stuff in the afternoon from the new detatchable quad which opened today. The picture below of a Condor circling on the thermals above the top of the new lift was taken by Chris.

Previously published This article was previously published on megeveski.com when I took some time out to ski. An index of these pages can be found here. Today we moved on to activities beyond The Central Theme; BASI has five strands of progression for people once they’re doing parallel turns correctly, these are: Piste, Steeps, Bumps, Variable (all kinds of off-piste conditions) and Freestyle. The plan for today was to cover Steeps and Bumps.

Previously published This article was previously published on megeveski.com when I took some time out to ski. An index of these pages can be found here. As with yesterday, today was similar to day 2 of our Trainee Instructor program only more detailed. We started with a warm up run under the triple chair at the top of the gondola; the snow was great and we figured that it may well be the only ‘proper’ skiing of the day, so we all had fun.

Previously published This article was previously published on megeveski.com when I took some time out to ski. An index of these pages can be found here. Today was the first day of our BASI Instructor training program. This consists of two sets of 5 days continuous assessment. The first five days focus on the technical skiing aspects and the second five days shift the focus slightly to include the teaching aspects.

I’m still skiing in Argentina, the training is going well and within 3 weeks I’ll know if I make the grade and qualify as a BASI Ski Instructor… Because of all the skiing and partying and work out here I haven’t been keeping up with many technical issues but this morning I checked bloglines and picked a couple of random feeds to catch up on. One of them was the Artima C++ Source feed which has recently published 5 articles by Scott Meyers.

Previously published This article was previously published on megeveski.com when I took some time out to ski. An index of these pages can be found here. I got my “numbers” this evening. The way the BASI ratings work is that each skill (piste short turns, piste carving, central theme, etc) gets a rating based on how well you can perform it. The ratings are from 1 to 6 and split into 3 groups of 2; 1-2 are awareness, 3-4 are practice, 5-6 are acquired skills.

Previously published This article was previously published on megeveski.com when I took some time out to ski. An index of these pages can be found here. Today was a glorious day, sunshine, perfect snow and no wind. We started the day with some runs under the three man chair above the gondola. We worked on elements of the Central Theme, first our basic parallel, and then our plough parallel. After a few runs of this we cut across to skier’s left towards the drag lifts.

Previously published This article was previously published on megeveski.com when I took some time out to ski. An index of these pages can be found here. Today we focused on short to medium radius turns on piste, with a few bumps on the way home. We started with a couple of warm up runs under the quad chair. Sorry for the lack of pictures recently, I’ve switched jackets and my orange one doesn’t have enough pocket space for me to carry the camera.

Previously published This article was previously published on megeveski.com when I took some time out to ski. An index of these pages can be found here. Today we ran the lessons that we prepared last night. These went well and we got lots of good feedback. Overall the lessons were fun to deliver and none of us really had any serious problems. Chris and I had a slight issue with talking too much and delivering too much information in one go; apparently this is common when you’re trying to deliver a lesson in a pair as you both want to say stuff and sometimes you say too much…