I've been teaching my good friend Aaron to ride a teleboard for a short while now (three ski days). He is helping me test my teleboarding book by using it to learn and giving me lots of great feedback. I'm using this post to take notes for the book. I hope you'll find some useful information in here, because it's the direction I'm going to steer this blog going forward.
Aaron and I got together for the 4th day of teleboarding, the first day of a four-day effort. We both learned a few things. For one, don't turn your nose up at a little rain. When the sky let loose on us for 15 minutes we saw many people head for the lodge--but we enjoyed some of the best carving snow I have seen. It's also a perfect night to pick out our tracks from the chair.
Hrmmm... what else did we learn?
* Don't get off the chairlift until you are over the hump and the ground starts to fall away. No heads were clobbered by chairlifts tonight...yet.
* These wet conditions are ideal for pure-lean edge changes. Aaron was apparently ready to take a crack at it too, with much success. Between turns, don't hop or spin,but just shift your weight o the other side. It makes the cleanest, most fluid turns of any edge-changing technique. The tracks left behind show a gap exactly the width of a teleboard where two arcs meet. This marks the first time Aaron was able to tailor technique to the conditions.
* The trail you choose really matters for beginners. We yo-yo'ed "Indian Summer" at Mount Wachusett all night, which is more or less the perfect trail to get up and running. Nothing but a wide, consistently shallow trail that goes on for a long time--And the length is key. Every run provided several chances to stop and try again. We quickly decided that there was no reason to be anywhere else for the night--a choice validated by Aaaron's rapid improvement every single run. When we head to the mountain again today (I'm finishing up this post the morning after night skiing), I'm sure I will take Aaron to some more difficult trails before too long, and I'm going to remind him that it's the technique he already knows that will get him through anything he comes across. Not leaning back, bailing out, or worrying about what he doesn't know how to do. A trail like "Indian Summer" is the way to build that technique to begin with.
* Getting across flat ground on a teleboard. Your front foot is clipped in and you push off with the other foot as if on a skateboard or snowboard. That much is obvious. Now, swing/kick your back leg forward, following through all the way. With your foot reaching forward, pause for an instant before rythmically swinging back for the next push-off. I consciously realized I was doing this last night and gave Aaron the tip, which he found helpful. I think it makes me about twice as efficient, squeezing more glide out of every kick.
That's it for Day 4. Day 5 starts now.
Aaron, my willing volunteer student:
A couple of my tracks, still visible in the slippery corn.
From left to right: Aaron, me, and Mikey (a friend who joined us for a few runs)
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