Instructor Training course – End of week 1

  We spent most of the day giving short (10 minute) lessons to each other and then reviewing the effectiveness of the instruction.  I’d been asked to do a session to improve rhythm and ease when skiing plough parallel turns.

  ‘Flow’ is the probably the most difficult of the 5 Fundamental Elements to explain in terms of how to achieve it although it’s components are not so hard to recognise; it has 3 parts: balancing the forces of the curve and terrain, co-ordination and rhythm, fluency and ease.

  Of these fluency and ease is probably the most nebulous.  So I decided to see what would happen if I gave the lesson without telling the group what we were specifically working on.  Instead I asked them to just relax and free ski a run using plough parallel turns matching in the fall line and think about what they felt their bodies doing.

  Then I tried to relax their bodies more with a breathing and muscle tensing exercise before I led them down the same run in a snake using a narrow corridor to force them to make quick turns and thereby make their movements quicker and hopefully more fluid.

  Unfortunately their comments were only that the slope wasn’t steep enough.  So we tried again on a steeper slope but I think their minds were on lunch more than my lesson so we packed it in and went for lunch.

  So the group didn’t do a lot of learning but I did – they wanted to have a single clear objective.  So that’s what I’ll use for the rest of this course, although I won’t abandon the idea of getting people to try and feel what their bodies are doing – I’ll just have to find a better approach in future and perhaps use it with a more receptive group.

  After the evening lecture (which was mercifully short) we had one-to-one sessions with Dave in which he graded us using the same scale that will be used for the final assessment in just under a week’s time.

  On a scale of 1 to 6, we need to score 5 on all elements of the Central Theme and on Piste Performance (essentially skiing at higher speeds).  Currently I’m scoring 3’s and 4’s so there’s some work to do there as well on Bumps, Steeps, Variables and Freestyle.

  What’s needed is practice; the question is whether there’s enough time left to reach the required standard.

Day 1

  Yesterday was spent travelling but once we’d arrived at our chalet in Meribel (and had dinner) we were given a brief overview of the course, which seems to have a greater emphasis on slalom than I expected.

  Today was the first day of the course proper and, as we learned last night, was to be a free ski day.  So we had the day to ourselves to ski where we liked although we still had to meet at 8:30am (at Chaudanne, a 20 minutes walk !) to collect our lift passes.

  11 of us set off up the mountain and once we were on the piste it was soon obvious that the standard was significantly higher than I had been anticipating.  The BASI blurb for GAP courses says that the minimum technical standard is the ability to ski parallel confidently and competently on red runs in variable conditions.

  Perhaps ‘minimum’ is the key word there as the guys I was with were all skiing hard and fast, easily exceeding my interpretation of competently (and exceeding the speed at which I usually ski confidently).

  This particular course is run jointly by BASI and ESF (the British Association of Snowsport Instructors and the French equivalent, L’école du ski français) and this is the reason for the greater emphasis on race training than other BASI GAP courses.  It makes sense given that those who ultimately intend to teach in France need to pass the speed-oriented tests the ESF use.

  Whether other courses attract so many skiers who easily exceed the minimum standard I’m not sure but it’s going to be challenging…