Ron LeMaster Interview

This episode is brought to you by Carv, the digital ski coach. Now, one of the features I've had the most fun with all time is simply the fact that Carv tracks every single turn you make. I treat it a bit like Strava, so at the end of the day it tells me exactly how many turns I've done, and those numbers keep adding up across the season. So last season in Australia, I had a few days where I was doing nearly 2,500 turns, and my legs were tired, but it was really cool to try and have that number there motivating me, and I'm quietly working my way towards my 1 millionth turn with Carv. So the other metrics I've been diving into lately, and these are new for this season, are very unique, and these are turn corridor and turn radius. And I don't see many skiers using them, but they tell you a lot about the shape and flow of your skiing. So the turn corridor shows you how far you're traveling across the hill, or the time almost between apex to apex, and how long you're taking to transition. While the turn radius measures the actual arc you create once you start the turn. So these can be different, you can have like a very wide corridor, say 18 meters, but a lower turn radius, or the other way around. So when you compare the two, it opens up a whole world of experimentation, and it would be a bit like a race coach will set different types of race courses to influence a racer or skier to change the timing and mix it up. So I encourage you to look into this if you've got Carv and play with it and see if you can manipulate it, because it's only going to improve your versatility. So I keep my Carv on my boots every single day because you never know quite know when like a change in technique or a new ski resort or skis will show up in the numbers, and it's great at the end of the day being able to check that, or even after the fact. And I'm really looking forward to the day I open the app and I see turn number 1 million So if you want to explore your skiing in a completely different way, check out Carv, the digital ski coach, and thank you team for sponsoring this episode.

Hello skiers, welcome back to another episode of the Global Skiing Podcast. I'm your host Tom Gellie, and in today's episode we get to listen to Ron LaMaster. Now Ron LaMaster is an author of 4 books, 2 of which are really well known. Skier's Edge and Ultimate Skiing. Now, if you've not read either of these books, I can highly recommend you get out there now. If you're really into technical skiing, get out there, purchase this book, and spend your season reading this thing. It's got great images, great insight into technical biomechanical knowledge, a look at boot setup, the world's best skiers sort of broken down in montage. It's a fantastic resource and I know I've gained a lot of knowledge from reading Ron's books. So, do that. So, in this episode, I got to chat with Ron and it was quite an informal chat. We'd never met each other and I asked him such questions as what exactly is turning in skiing. Also, the question of what does he think come come first, edging or turning, when we make a ski turn, how we set up our ski boots, the forces we have to deal with in skiing, as well as what he thinks of some of the best World Cup athletes and what they're doing with their movements that separates them from the rest. So, I really hope you enjoy this episode, I had a great time getting to know Ron and sharing some of my thoughts with him and hearing his ideas. I hope to get out there and meet him one day and go for a real ski with him. And, ah, oh, and finally, the last thing I'd like to say is I want to apologize for any of the podcasts previously where the quality of audio has been poor. So, a note, I do this podcast for free and in my own time as a bit of a passion, and I like to get information and knowledge out there to skiers all around the world, so I don't have a heap a big budget to spend on doing this, nor now with an 8-week-old son do I have the time to spend to really make it the high-quality product I'd like. So, I just want to say I apologize for that in advance, and I hope you guys get the content out of the podcast that you can, given the poor quality sometimes. And yeah, if— and finally, if you have any feedback for me, please feel free to send me an email at tgellie@gmail.com. I'd love to hear some feedback. And please feel free to share the podcast and enjoy this next episode.

Thanks. Bye.

Yes, Ron.

Alright. Well, Ron, it's really nice to meet you over a Skype call. Thanks very much for accepting the invitation.

Sure, my pleasure.

Yeah, I make these chats pretty low-key, pretty relaxed, so I've just got a list of questions here that I'm sort of— that I've got written down, but I'm hoping to, you know, the conversation gets a little bit free-flowing. I read both your books. I've got both your books, really like them. Um, so my first question is, how did you get into, you know, skiing? How did you get into analyzing biomechanics of skiing and where you are today? Where did, where did the whole sort of journey start for you?

Well, I grew up skiing. I grew up in Colorado. I skied since I was a little kid. Well, when I was a teenager, I read everything I could find about skiing. I just wanted to learn more about how it worked and how you're supposed to do it. Then I went to college, studied engineering, and that sort of set the die, I guess. It's just I have that technical bent and like to analyze things and understand how they work. And I got involved in instruction and then coaching full-time for a number of years. And pardon me, just always looked at skiing from that technical side of things. Yeah. Figured if I could understand it, then maybe I could do a better job of doing it myself and coaching it to other people.

Yeah. So would you— I mean, I know this is a tricky question to answer. But would you consider yourself, were you a naturally talented skier?

Boy, that's really hard to answer. You know, I grew up skiing better than some people and skiing worse than others. You know, it depends on who you compare yourself to. I honestly think that my ability to ski is is maybe a combination of having some sort of physical predisposition, uh, being lucky to have feet that, that work well in ski boots. Uh, you know, if you're someone who has hammer toes or incredibly high instep or something, you're doomed, it would seem.

Yeah.

But I, I think that really having analyzed skiing a lot and understanding it and having an opportunity to watch just great skiers a lot has had a lot to do with me being able to ski, you know, reasonably well. I think I'm still a reasonably good skier. Talented, that's hard to say. I don't consider myself a talented athlete in general.

Sure, sure. I guess from my perspective, I know that getting into the details and understanding skiing more, all the technical aspects has helped me to progress. So I was just wondering if there was like a drive early on that, that, you know, you sort of figured that out, you realize, oh, this is really going to help me, you know, I'm passionate about skiing. I'm not like, you know, because there's always that guy on the mountain that, you know, he doesn't really know what he's doing, but he, he has the touch, and, or she has the touch, and they, you know, they're just born with it. So if you're not, then that kind of drives you into seeking more information about how these people that do do that do it.

Oh, I, I, I really do think that having a, an understanding of skiing has helped me ski better.

Yeah.

And helped me continue to ski and, and actually continue to ski better as the equipment gets better. Certainly my, my physiological abilities aren't getting any better. If anything, I mean, they've declined as I've gotten older. But yeah, I, I think it has something to do with it.

Yeah. So what was— what would you say is the highlight of your coaching career? Where was— where did the— where's the pinnacle? Or is it— are you at the pinnacle right now? Because I know I read you're, you're involved with, uh, helping, uh, the U.S. ski team. So are you still involved? Yeah.

Not so much the last few years. I spent, yeah, I mean, I have less involvement with them than I used to. I haven't traveled with the US team in Europe for several years. Traveled with some other some other national teams in Europe, but not the U.S. team. I don't know, I, well, probably when I was in my 20s was, I don't know if I'd say it was a pinnacle, I guess, you know, before you have all these other things going on in your life that, that, you know, this is a good time, you know, and I could, uh, and I guess as I was discovering coaching and, uh, working with skiers, you know, that was pretty, pretty—

so what, what capacity were you—

I still really enjoy it. I just went—

sorry, what, what capacity were you involved with, um, you know, the US ski team or these, uh, ski teams in Europe? What, what do they utilize you Technical advisor, I guess.

That's what I was. That's what the people on the US team called me. I would, you know, I'd basically talk to the coaches more than the athletes, although in the case of one of the Europeans I worked with, you know, I worked directly with the athlete. But a lot of it was talking with the coaches about who was doing what, who's doing better than others and why, and, you know, how might we be able to communicate what's going on to a particular skier. I think my contribution is analysis. It's objective description of what's going on, what could go on, how you— the objective description of what a person could do to perhaps ski better. And then it's, it's a special province of a great coach to be able to communicate that to an athlete.

Yeah.

My experience is that there are some people, a minority of people, who respond to the objective description of things. And what people more often respond well to is the right subjective description of what that person might feel when they do the right thing.

Yeah. So could you— can you think then of one example, say, working with one of these World Cup athletes when that was the case? So perhaps you picked up a, um, something that could be, you know, worked on in their technique, and you explained to the coach, and then the coach, you know, it came across as something really simple as you know, feel your pinky toe at this part, or feel, you know, more pressure through your heel, or whatever it was. Can you think of a particular example where that rang true, where it wasn't the objective description but it was translated? I know this is putting you on the spot.

Yeah, let's see. Well, an example would be talking about how someone's saying that someone's center of mass isn't moving across their feet going into the turn.

Yep.

You know, the person's not— the person— well, let me back up a bit here. One of the things that happens in the transition from one turn to the next is that somehow you get your center of mass to go in a straight, more or less straight line across your feet while your feet continue to turn underneath you. Yeah, that's how. And, you know, you'll say, you know, you've got to, you know, relax these muscles, you know, detach your feet from your, from your upper body or something like that, which is sort of the objective description. But then, you know, a coach would say, I want you to move your hips across your feet.

Yep.

You know, move your hips across your feet. Now, in in objective fact, the skier can't physically move themselves across their feet. All they can do is do things such that their body's momentum carries them across their feet. Yeah. You said that as if you understand what I'm saying.

Yes. Yeah. Hopefully the listeners do too.

If you don't have something to push against, Yeah, yeah, if you don't have something to push against, you know, there's no way you can project yourself across your feet.

So that's, that's really interesting. So that's exactly, I guess, what I'm getting to, whereas so a coach could understand that they need to get their hips across their feet and you can see that they are not doing that, but from your perspective, understanding biomechanics and that you know, you need something to push or pull against in order for the center of mass to change its position, then, you know, you have a better understanding of, right, okay, well, it's not possible to actually tell the person to do that cue. You need to think of other ways to make that movement happen.

Right, right. You know, in some terms, that might mean you say to the skier, you know, I want you to go soft at the end of turn.

Yeah.

Relaxing the muscles in your mid-body, which will, you know, let your upper body go in more or less straight line. Or, uh, you know, I want you— I want you to dive into the turn, or something like that.

Yeah, yeah.

Good coaches, you know, have good lines like that.

Yeah, yep. So, so you would be involved with taking video analysis or being on the hill with the athletes in a training session and and finding areas where they could improve upon and then sitting down and working out these solutions.

Right. Or coaches would say, what I would really like to do is at this race, we want to look at transitions. We want to look at transitions on steep hills.

Yeah.

Excuse me. Don't put it there. I don't want to drink.

Anyway, uh, so yeah, I might look at transitions, right?

We'd look at transitions and, and, uh, then go back and look at the video and talk about it, see what we see and see who's faster and who's slower. And, and, you know, perhaps I can, I can analyze what's going on and yeah, we can talk about it from that point of view.

So straight on from that, who would you Who do you think at the moment on the World Cup has a really good transition on the steeps?

Oh, well, I don't think there's anything better than— anyone better than Marcel Hirscher on the men's side. I think there are other people who are, you know, in his league. The thing about Hirscher, I think you have to keep in mind, is his body type. You know, he's short, he's got short legs, and because of that, he skis differently than a lankier skier like Kristoffersen or like Steffen Lüthi, who's very tall and lanky. You know, they move differently. But I would say as far as transitions go, uh, Hirscher's got about as good a control over what's going on as anybody, uh, especially in GS, you know, where other people will, will, you know, they'll feather their ski into the turn until they see the spot when they know, uh, they really want to, they want to really knife it. Uh, Hirscher, Hirscher seems to be very, very positive about just where he wants to make the turn well before, uh, you're the middle of the transition. You know, Frey starts the transition and he can let himself come off the ground and still land at just the right spot on an edge and make it work. And he never seems to make this turn in the wrong spot.

Yeah, so that's really interesting you point out the, the body shape types. Because I guess that comes back to this engineering sort of background, you know, it's about levers and fulcrums and pivot points and that sort of stuff. So why is it that his frame, his skeletal frame, sort of gives him a bit of an advantage?

Well, I don't know if I'd say it gives him an advantage. What I would say though is that some of some of the elements of his skiing, some of his style work for a person who's built like that. He doesn't bend forward as much at the waist as some other skiers. Well, like, I think of Daniel Yule, who's a taller, lankier guy, Luca Aerni. These guys don't have short legs and they have to bend forward more at the waist. To keep their center of mass from getting too far back when they flex deeply.

Yeah. So yeah, he's able to flex really deeply and still stay relatively over his center of mass. Sorry, his base of support, his feet.

Yeah, I would suspect that he's probably got a fair amount of forward lean in his boots too. I don't know for a fact, but I would wouldn't be surprised if he does. Yeah, but you look at a guy like Svendahl or, or Luis, you know, these guys, they, they look like they're crouching when, you know, forward from the waist when they flex deeply because they're tall. As much as anything, I think it has to do with the lengthener and how long that is in relation to your torso. Yeah, because as you bend your legs, it's going to go back.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. So yeah, people, people, you know, that's, I guess, back to your point, you had a couple of things on, on your side, feet that fit ski boots, so the equipment didn't sort of hindering you as much, and perhaps you're, you know, you weren't too disproportionate through your limbs, so you didn't have trouble always, you know, finding the center. And yeah, all those things really kind of matter, don't they? And sometimes, as I guess coaches or instructors, you could perhaps forget that and just be like, why, why you're always back at the transition? You're always back at the transition. You know, get forward, get forward, instead of understanding maybe why that person is struggling and needing to take a different kind of approach. Yeah, like maybe modifying their boots. Right.

I actually have a long femur, but I was fortunate in the early '70s to spent time with Georges Hubert in France and he understood that the forward lean in your boots has to be set up to work with your, well, your body so that the recent boots have forward lean is so that you can flex up and down a long way and keep your center of mass, you know, over your feet. And he understood that. And there's a very simple test for determining how much forward lean you need in a boot. But, and so I benefited from that. The thing is that there are a lot of, there are a lot of coaches out there who don't understand that. And for instance, there are a lot of coaches who don't really under, probably don't understand lateral canting all that well either. And so, young athletes who might be talented enough to do well, but they need some sort of adjustment to their boots to get around something like naturally being a little knock-kneed or bowlegged or whatever, uh, never get past a certain point because the equipment hasn't been set up for them properly.

Yeah, absolutely. So Ron, are there some things then you do with every single pair of boots you buy, say if you had to get a new pair of boots, that you modify or change to give yourself the best sort of position on your skis?

Oh sure, I measure myself for cant. Just using a plumb bob really to get started and then skiing them until it adjusts the canting until I can feel like it's right.

Yeah.

The other thing that I always set up is the forward lean so that I have a large, a long range of vertical motion and can still use the front of my ski in a low position if I need to or sort of thing.

So why—

and the other thing I—

sorry, you keep— you go ahead. Yep, the other thing you're saying.

Oh, the other thing I do is I, uh, you know, I lift or lower my heel in the, in the boot, uh, so that I feel like the boot works right with me. You know, the people talk about ramp angle a lot, and I think it's important important, but I'm not sure I've ever heard a good explanation of why, or from anybody. I know what works for me is if my heel's too low in the boot, then I feel that when I, when I bend my ankle, flex my ankle, and I push against the front of the boot, that I'm hitting the top of the boot.

Yeah.

And if my heel, and if my heel's too high I feel like when I move into the front of the boot, I don't feel the top of the boot, and the place where all the pressure is is down under that third buckle. Yeah, yeah, the lower buckle on the cuff.

Yep.

I, I have this— this is just, this is just a very vague theory on my part. This has not been validated by anybody who really knows boot design, but I, I have the I, I have the feeling that when you, when you flex a boot, not that they flex very much, but when you flex a boot, it kind of flexes around sort of an axis somewhere, and you want that, you want the axis that your ankle flexes around to be pretty well lined up with the boot axis, right?

Yeah.

And that by by moving the— my heel up and down to the boot, I find the spot where, okay, now I've got very even pressure against the whole front of the boot, top to bottom, when I push into it. That's, that's how I set up my heels.

It's interesting, this, uh, this last Southern Hemisphere winter when I was in New Zealand, I got to use— you might have seen this new technology coming out called Carv, where they've got foot sensors that attach to your iPhone. Have you seen that?

Oh, I've heard of this, yeah.

Yeah, so I got to test trial some of that developing technology. It's really cool. And anyway, so I did a couple of runs, recorded it. It sort of gives you visual feedback after you finish the run of, you know, by red dots meaning lots of pressure, green dots little pressure. And there's like 24— I think they're upgrading to 100 and something sensors, but 24 sensors under the sole of your foot representing where your pressure is. I got down and I thought, you know, this sounds pretty good, you know, that's how I usually ski. And there were— there, most of the dots were more sort of centered or on the heel, and I never actually really made the dots light up red under the ball of my foot. And I was like, but I can feel the ball of my foot pressured, you know, so what's going on? Anyway, so next day I'd been meaning to do this for a while, but I mucked around with actually gas pedaling my boots. So, I gas pedaled my boots.

Lifting the toe?

Yeah, lifting the toe up, which seems counterintuitive, so I kind of dropped the heel relative to the front of the foot. Recorded with this Carv technology again, and lo and behold, suddenly I've got these red dots up at the ball of my foot. And, and kinesthetically, I could feel a lot more tip pressure early in the turn. And, um, yeah, and true ball of the foot kind of pressure, which is really interesting to me. But I guess I put it down to you know, if you were— if you're doing squats, um, on, on a downward sloping hill, you sort of have to lean into your heels a lot more to sort of stay centered so you don't pitch over and lose your heel contact. So I was wondering if just proportionately my body shape sets me up already forward, so I actually need to do the opposite. To force my body to push into the balls of my feet?

Well, the kind of sensor that you're talking about is one that's under, as you said, under the sole of your foot, right? There's a kind of sensor like that that's been used a lot in ski research, especially in Europe, called Pedar. PEDAR, and it's— a lot of researchers feel like it's okay, it's reasonably good for detecting total amount of pressure, total amount of force, but— excuse me a second. That's okay. There's a problem with them being used for fore-aft, determining fore-aft pressure. And this is the problem. If you lean into the front of your boot, okay, the front of your boot acts like a lever.

Yep.

And the resistance of the front of the boot puts pressure on the tip of the ski. That does not necessarily also mean that there's pressure under the ball of your foot. Correct.

Yep.

Okay. If you're skiing with your top bucket, your top 2 buckles undone, then, then, then a sensor under your footbed, under your foot, is probably going to be a pretty good fore-aft measure. Yeah. Except then if you think about leaning against the back of your boot.

Yep.

Against the back of your boot, you're going to put a lot of pressure on the tail, but there might— that might not translate to pressure under the heel of your foot.

Yes. Yeah, interesting.

So yeah, um, so really the— this is a little bit off the side, but the kind of— the kind of sensor that you really need to determine fore-aft pressure is something that goes underneath the boot itself, you know, between the boot and the ski. And people have done, people have done, have used sensors like that, but the problem with them is they get mounted under your binding, okay, between your binding and the ski. Yep. So they lift the binding off the ski, they also stiffen the middle of the ski, and it changes the way people ski. Plus, it's very difficult to take them off, put them on, put them on different people's skis. It's kind of a technical problem with this kind of force sensing approach to ski research in general. But I guess my— what I would say to you is just because this, the Carv system, didn't show the pressure being under the ball of your foot doesn't mean that you weren't applying pressure to the tip of the ski.

Yeah, got it, got it. That's really interesting to hear that. That's— and that I guess confirms the confusion in what I was feeling versus what the data was telling me.

This episode is brought to you by Carv, the digital ski coach. Now one of the features I've had the most fun with all time is simply the the fact that Carv tracks every single turn you make. I treat it a bit like Strava, so at the end of the day it tells me exactly how many turns I've done, and those numbers keep adding up across the season. So last season in Australia, I had a few days where I was doing nearly 2,500 turns, and my legs were tired, but it was really cool to try and have that number there motivating me. And I'm quietly working my way towards my 1 millionth turn with Carv. So the other metrics I've been diving into lately, and these are new for this season, are very unique, and these are turn corridor and turn radius. And I don't see many skiers using them, but they tell you a lot about the shape and flow of your skiing. So the turn corridor shows you how far you're traveling across the hill, or the time almost between apex to apex, and how long you're taking to transition, while the turn radius measures the actual arc you create once you start the turn. So these can be different. You can have like a very wide corridor, say 18 meters, but a lower turn radius, or the other way around. So when you compare the two, it opens up a whole world of experimentation, and it would be a bit like a race coach will set different types of race courses to influence a racer or skier to change the timing and mix it up. So I encourage you to look into this if you've got Carv and play with it and see if you can manipulate it, because it's only going to improve your versatility. So I keep my Carv on my boots every single day because you never know quite know when like a change in technique or a new ski resort or skis will show up in the numbers. And it's great at the end of the day being able to check that, or even after the fact. And I'm really looking forward to the day I open the app and I see turn number 1 million. So if you want to explore your skiing in a completely different way, check out Carv, the digital ski coach. And thank you team for sponsoring this episode.

Right. So, uh, you know, putting a gas pedal under your— under the toe of your boots, okay, as long as it doesn't reduce the forward lean in your boots so much that you can no longer be in balance in a low position.

Yeah, well, that's the thing. I think these, because they're Fischer boots, and, and actually they had quite a good amount of forward lean, um, so it didn't— if I still could do a full squat in my boots and, and fall over.

Oh, well then you're fine.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. But it was really interesting to feel definitely a lot more engagement and sensitivity to, to tip pressure. It felt like I could really apply resistance to it. So when it dug in and the tip wanted to bend back to me, I was able to kind of drive against it with my forefoot and, and keep resisting it, so it built pressure for longer before I released it. So yeah, so it was, it was just nice because I'd never felt that because obviously no boots in the history of my ownership had ever been gas pedaled, so I'd never really felt that sensation before. But I know I was after that sensation.

Yeah, I, I've talked to a number of people who have gotten a positive effect out of doing that. Yeah.

So, Ron, what made you write your two books? Was there a lack of sort of good material out there? Was it just a project you wanted to do and share information? Like, was it a series of— you'd written some articles and you thought, oh, I could actually probably turn this into a book? What was it?

You know, kind of a combination of those things. I mentioned when I was a teenager, I would read everything I could find, and I never found anything that was all that satisfying until in the early '70s when I was introduced to Georges Hubert's stuff. And that really had a strong influence on me. That's one reason I went over and spent time with him. He had a very clear, objective, analytical way of looking at things. But nothing had— nobody that I'd read in the United States anyway had done that, and I just felt like I had something to say that I thought might make sense to other people, might be useful. And I'd always been strongly motivated by photos and felt like that's the most important part of a book on skiing is to show compelling visual examples and then try and describe them. Yeah, I'd been doing some magazine writing for a few years and some stuff in the Professional Ski Instructors of America's magazine journal back in the late '80s, early '90s, and someone from PSIA, Professional Ski Instructors of America, approached me to work on a book with him, a guy named Joris Wagners, who's really a— he's been a key figure in understanding skiing from a technical point of view here in the U.S. for a long time. And he and I worked on something together for PSIA, and then he suggested that I submit a book proposal to Human Kinetics, my publisher, and sounded like a good idea to me. Great.

Yeah. And that's where it started. Yeah.

Yeah.

And so, you know, some, like I really gained a lot of knowledge and insight into some of the details of Tales of Skiing. When I first read your book. It's really, really easy to read for those people that haven't gone out and bought it and had a look at it. It's a great book. But, so starting out, what, how would you describe what turning is? Because that's what we're doing in skiing, right? We're sort of turning, turning, turning, turning, turning. The only people that really straight line you know, as freestylers into jumps and people doing just, you know, speed, speed, you know, velocity.

Yeah.

Challenge.

Yeah. Well, yeah, it's skiing is for the most part turning. You're right. What turning is, is getting the snow to push on you in such a way that you change direction. That's kind of dry, but it's kind of dry description, but I think that a key thing for people to understand is that you don't make yourself turn. It's the snow that makes you turn. And you put your ski against the snow in such a way that the snow pushes you where you want to go.

Yep.

And you can, you can do it in a way that the snow is harsh and plays with you roughly. And you can do it in such a way that the snow pushes you in a manner that just feels really good. It's a lot of fun.

Yeah. Yeah.

One thing I'd mention about that too is there's a person in the US, a woman named Murmur Blakeslee, who was a significant ski instructor for a long time. States. And she has said to me a number of times that she thinks that a problem we have as, as coaches, as instructors, and skiers in general is we're very body-centric. Everybody wants to know what they, what they're supposed to do with their body. And she really believes, and I agree with her, that you should be thinking in terms of what is it that I want my ski to do. What is it? That's really the Well, that's the first thing you do.

Yeah, exactly. That's the starting point, isn't it? Because otherwise you're just kind of looking like you're dancing around for show without any outcome. Yeah.

I really wanted to call my second book Skiing from the Snow Up, not Ultimate Skiing. That was my publisher's idea. We just had a hard time. Agreeing on a title. But yeah, I think that Skiing from the Snow Up would have, uh, better, better expressed my point of view and sort of overarching theme. Yeah, because that's where it all starts.

Yeah, yeah. I'm reading, doing some my own research and study at the moment, reading a couple of biomechanics of sport and exercise books, and —And one sentence that really sort of resonated with me reading in there was, you know, "Muscles can change the motion of a body's limbs, but these will not produce any change in motion of the body's center of mass. The body is only able to change its motion if it can push or pull against some external object," which is the ski against the snow, right? Right, yeah. Yeah, and it's just, it's really cool because I mean, you probably, a bit about what I've gotten into, I've sort of delved down this route of understanding the body and dealing with pain. You know, most of my days clients are coming in because they have sore knees or backs or feet or something and they're trying to figure out why. And so I've very much gotten into understanding how the body works. And, uh, yeah, it's just good now I'm going more into, okay, I understand all these movements, but now what— how can I best manipulate or understand how these movements can create these outcomes or these forces on snow? And why are some people really good at manipulating it? What, you know, what is it? Because you understand— so getting the that, you know, your point about, you know, skiing from the snow up, that's definitely the first bit. But then what separates them the best is how they use their body to manipulate the forces.

Right. No, I agree. There are things that people do that, well, let me rephrase this. Most skiers have certain movements that they make that produce some positive effect, something that needs to happen, but also have liabilities. You know, think of throwing your hip out to make your skis start turning. You know, yes, there are reasons why that will help your skis start turning, but it has some liabilities to it. Get your puts your skis flat on the snow, tends to give you some angular momentum that you don't want, that, you know, plays havoc with, you know, the latter part of your turn. I think you understand what I'm saying. Yeah, definitely. What, what, uh, what I tried to do when I look at a skier is I say, what is it this person's doing that's that's getting in their way. Why are they doing it? They're probably doing it because aside from the things that are getting in their way, they're getting some kind of positive effect out of that. Yeah. What would be a better thing that they could do to produce the same positive effect without the liabilities?

Yep. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Yeah, that's a really great way of thinking about it because You know, we don't— the body doesn't— the body is super smart, you know. If your brain is saying, right, I need to turn that, I need to get to the left, you know, it's got quite a few different ways that it can kind of make that happen. It just, I guess, sort of depends on your development, you know, how you started skiing, whether you just did it with a friend and got no tuition and you kind of figured out that if you did throw your hip out a bit, you did get over to the left. Yeah, and so you skidded around a bit, but you didn't know that that wasn't what everyone else was doing because you had no other reference. So yeah, it's cool to think that.

Of course, if you're a beginner, all the people around you are probably doing the same thing. Hmm. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. And it's sort of working for them too.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So I Sorry, you go ahead.

Yeah, I was going to say, over the years, I started skiing in the '50s, 1950s, and you had to do a lot more to get your skis to do something back then. You had to— there was more effort involved in manipulating your skis. You had to manipulate your skis more. And as skis have gotten better and better and better, especially since the late '90s, skiing has become more a matter of putting your ski in, in an attitude relative to your motion and the snow where it's going to do the right thing. And then you set up your body so that you can balance against the ski in a supple way. And be able to move and adapt to changes in terrain and that sort of thing. So it's less that we're making the skis do something as much as we're putting them in a position where they do something and then we ride on them. Yes.

So I was, the last conversation I had with a friend, Paul Lorenz, we were sort of talking about closed chain mechanics versus open chain biomechanics. And I was sort of saying to him that most of my thought is most of good skiing comes from closed chain mechanics because they're more efficient, because you're not trying— you're just— they're more sort of balancing the mass. Closed chain being more eccentrically kind of in my opinion anyway, in skiing dominated because you're letting joints— oh yeah, move into the position and the muscles are lengthening to control that position, right, as it moves away from neutral. And so the more people use open chain where the, the skis are not connected with anything, then I guess it comes back to that, that thing you're not actually creating any forces against the snow. Yeah, which, which, yeah, I guess the start of the turn, that top half, is where it's the most difficult to create closed chain movements.

Hmm, that's interesting. Yeah, I thought about that.

Yeah, and I was saying to him too, I don't know your thoughts on this, but you know, generally fore and aft movements on the ski would be a sort of— are going to end up being a little bit more influenced through your open chain movements because the snow doesn't give you that much grip or friction to be able to— yeah, for enough to push or pull against. Whereas laterally, the edge, as soon as you start doing it, you've got— hopefully your skis are sharp, you've got grip to sense that, that closed chain thing happening. And then, you know, and I guess that's what, you know, what comes first, edging or, or, or turning. And, you know, I think it has to be edging so you can then also, you know, create rotational closed chain kind of movements to, to balance and be efficient against. But, um, yeah, it was just interesting the other day, I was thinking about, I was like, gee, you know, that's why I think so many people struggle with fore and aft stuff is because they're, uh, you know, they're probably— because walking, you know, to get forward and back walking, we've got this grippy ground that's very easy. We're used to our body pushing and pulling against the ground, whereas skiing, you have to be used to actually having your feet kind of free underneath you, and that's how you manipulate your fore and aft balance more, more easily.

So, right. Yeah. Because, you know, if you, if you can, if you think of it as a free body, the mass of your feet and your skis is small compared to your torso. So you can move your feet. You can move your feet relatively easily forward, aft, underneath you.

Yep. Yep. And if you try and move, move your upper body like towards, say, your feet are in front of you. To— for— in order for the upper body to get over the feet, then the feet have to be able to stay still. And if you're thinking that's— your body's predicting that's what's going to happen, right? I'm going to move my rib cage towards my feet. But, but unfortunately what happens is the feet slide as that happens. So then you don't get this— your outcome is different to what you think or predict would usually happen on ground, which has a lot more Oh yeah, yeah, yeah. It's just interesting. That's— and that's—

sure, that's why people fall over when they get off the chairlift the first time.

Yeah, yeah, exactly.

Because they expect there's— they expect there's going to be reaction from the— from the ground, which should back up on them. Yeah, back up the hill, but there's no friction.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. It's interesting, like, I also listened to a few, um, clever people that talk about neuroscience, and this one guy's saying that the main sort of function of our nervous system is prediction. You know, we're always just trying to predict what is going to happen because that makes us feel, you know, safe and, and know what's going to happen, because obviously unpredictability is not great. So we're always trying to be able to predict things. So like back to your Marcel Hirscher thing, he just seems to have pure confidence in predicting, you know, 10 meters ahead. That's this, this is where my body is going to be. This is how it's going to feel. This is what's going to happen on the snow. And he's totally confident in himself that that's the case. Yeah. Yeah. So his nervous system is probably functioning at a really high level, very calm but very high level because it's not getting this kind of you know, freaked out, fight or flight too much. Like, you know, we're not sure if the ski is going to hold there or where our center of mass is going to be there. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

How much inclination can I— yeah, how much inclination will be able to support, you know, and engage. Yeah, and there have been a few races where he has, uh, nobody else Everybody else made a lot of mistakes. You know, people didn't look, you know, the course was set such a way that there wasn't a lot of rhythm and there were big changes. And he looked very comfortable. Like last year in Garmisch, there was a giant slalom that nobody looked good except for him. And he looked like every turn he knew just where he wanted to be. At Alta Badia last week, His second run was just incredible. Yeah. Nobody, nobody else looked like they knew where they wanted to be all the time like he did. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. So, I mean, I think at some level you've got to look beyond, like, you know, the equipment setup, the skis, the technique, and look at it from sort of that nervous system level of how confident and trusting are you that everything's going to happen and that your, your thoughts don't take over and go, I don't know if I can do this, this is icy, it's steep here, oh, you know, so-and-so crashed 3 runs ago. And, you know, he, he must have that side, I think, as well as his amazing technique and everything. But you see a lot of really good racers in training, but then they can't put put it into the race day. That's where he sort of separates himself.

Yeah, probably some of that is probably confidence. Yep. And not, you know, not having any kind of, I would say, conscious doubts, but your uncertainties, level of error, you know, margins of error that you think you're going to— Something I've talked about a fair amount in the past around here in the States is what happens in the transition. You know, when you start to reduce your inclination at the end of a turn, you're basically falling across your feet, right? You know, when you finish a turn and link it with another turn, there is a period of time in which during which you're toppling from one side of your feet to the other. And once you— you don't have a whole lot of control over how fast that goes once you started it, especially once you've literally crossed over your feet. And I talk about the estimation problem. You know, when you're finishing a turn, when you're finishing a turn, you have to estimate how much grip you're going to get from the snow, how fast you're going to be going, uh, where you want— what you want the shape of that turn to be, and how much inclination you're going to need, how much you're going to need to redirect the ski so that when you do land on your skis after the transition, you're in balance and the ski does what you want it to do. It's, it's a very complex complicated problem to solve and a lot of what becoming a, I'd say, an advanced to expert skier is about is learning to solve that problem and when you, you know, so that you can accurately release yourself out of one turn so that you make the land and make the next turn just the way you want it to. Yeah. You can't teach people. No. You don't teach these people.

Yeah, that's right. And there's that prediction thing again. You have to have done it so many different ways in different conditions to kind of be able to— your brain in thousands of seconds to compute and predict, okay, this is how much I need to release. This is probably where I'm going to be inclined at the top of the turn. Right.

And people who don't have that ability or unsure of it. When you put them on, for instance, a steep slope, that's when they start to stem. Yeah, they're uphill foot. Yep. Because they're not going to let themselves fall into the turn and then catch themselves with their skis. They want to be stable on that downhill ski and start while they're starting the turn with their other foot.

So what do you think is the mechanism that first starts that release, that toppling from the old turn into the new turn, that transition?

There are several. One of them is an edge set. You know, if you pivot your skis quickly and just stick them in the snow, your feet slow down, right? And your upper body gets carried across by its momentum. That's— we don't do that as much anymore, although on steep terrain, people still do that. Another thing you can do is you can make the ski tighten up at the end of the turn. You come around a turn and then at the very bottom you add some knee angulation and it will make the radius of turn that the ski's making decrease. And if you were in balance before you made the radius decrease, you will now be out of balance and you'll flip, fall over to the other side. Yeah. Did that make sense?

Yeah, like a high side. You kind of high side yourself.

Exactly. That's how you finish a turn on a bicycle. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Like back underneath you. Yeah. Yeah. And another way to do it is to, let's say you're in balance, carving through a turn. If you just relax your quads and your buttocks muscles and your lower back, that effectively disengages your, your upper body from your feet. Yep. So the skis are no longer pushing your upper body in an arc. Your upper body is gonna go in a straight line. And, and you, you see this a lot, uh, in racing. Uh, it's what people here in the States would call a retraction turn, maybe. Yep. When you see this a lot, especially in slalom, you see it a lot in GS too. It's not, it's not the only way to start a transition, but it's one way to do it. And there are a couple of others too. Yeah.

So I've really spent a lot of time getting to understand the joints in the body and particularly the feet. Um, and sort of something I've been playing around with and, uh, over the last few years is that moment, that transitional moment, being very much as, uh, the outside foot being supinated, going into supination. Um, because that, that sort of unbalances that, that pressure to the, to the medial side of the foot starts biasing it to the outside. Plus the supination kind of keeps the foot turning in the direction of that old turn, and so you're not sort of disrupting that, the finish of the arc. And then just the way we're sort of set up in the body to work, you know, for walking, that supination movement helps propel, so you also keep energy and, you know, because it stiffens the foot, so then you don't lose energy through the muscles, it goes more through the joints, and so you actually get a kick into the new turn from that motion. Yeah, so I don't know if you've ever played around with that at all, but yeah, it's really— I'll send you a video of some stuff I've made and you can check it out and sure, make your own— yeah, yeah. But I've, you know, my ski boots over the years have gotten freer and freer in terms of how my foot can function. It's still— they're still very good contact and, and, uh, feel, as in I can feel all around my leg is supported and, and, you know, every direction has got— it's not further to go in one direction than another. It's what I'm trying to do, but then I'm trying to allow my feet the ability to make all these subtle, fine changes so that, that moment you're talking about in the transition, I can sort of start with the least amount of effort from my foot and then let the body kind of move over from that instigated movement.

So, so if you, if you supinate your outside foot, does that also release the edge? When I think of supination, I think of, uh, you know, I think of turning my hand over so that I can hold soup, right? Exactly, exactly. That's, that's the mnemonic, right? Exactly. Uh, so is, is, are you doing that with your foot? You're kind of rolling it so that in such a way that the The downhill edge would drop?

Yes, and the thing I'm playing with is how much of that movement is an active movement of the foot and how much is a passive movement. So using the bigger joints like my hips, knees, upper body to work. And so is that what you're talking about, relaxing the quads and all those other things? So allowing those big joints to move. but at the same time feeling my foot is free to supinate with that movement, so it keeps pressure against the snow, it keeps that, you know, the forces continuing to act against the snow through the strong foot as the edge is coming off. And then the inside foot at that exact same moment is going through a pronation moment.

Right, right, yeah, to get the ski on edge.

Yeah, to get the ski on edge. Pronation moment is, you know, when the foot really opens up and sort of is set up to take mass on top of it. It's kind of this suspension device, so you get this double effect of releasing and then being ready to support and take the weight of the body on the new outside foot early. Well before you're sort of in that turn, new turn.

And by the way, I agree with the statement he made a while ago that, you know, you have to edge the ski before it's going to turn you. Mm-hmm. You know, yes, you don't turn, you don't, you don't turn the ski and then edge it. You know, no, you got to get, you got to get the ski on edge early. Yeah, there's a I don't know if you know who André Myhrre is. Yep. Swedish skier. Yeah. You see him move his old outside, new knee inside, new inside knee. You see him move that over in the transition a lot. Yeah. You see him, you see that his leg move that way, which would have a similar effect on the on the ski, I would think.

Yeah, absolutely. And you know, back to your, your, um, you know, when you analyze people, it's like he's obviously found that movement helps give him some positive outcome. It'll be interesting to see whether that's, you know, due to the fact of his physical makeup, his technique, or certain strengths muscle strength so that he finds that he's really strong through that. Because other people don't do it yet achieve a similar kind of— Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. You just, your mind ends up kind of exploding when you start going into thinking about all these different things that's good.

Yeah. Yeah. If it's a, if it's a Kostelic used to lead a bit with inside ski too, you'd see him. Turn the tip of his inside ski towards the inside of the new turn. Hmm. As he goes to do kind of a diverging splay of his skis going into the turn a lot of times in slalom. Yeah. Earlier on, not as later in his career, not as much, but yeah. And I don't know how much of these things are things that people do consciously or things that in and of themselves, that movement in and of itself has some great effect or if it's something that leads to another effect that like you do something with your inside foot and it causes you to do something positive with your outside foot. Yeah. It's hard to know. Yeah, it is hard to know. Talking to the athletes themselves, I've got to say most athletes don't know. Yeah. There aren't an awful lot of athletes who think about it that way. You know, they ski by feel. You know, they always talk about how it feels and that, you know, that works for them.

Yeah. Yeah. That's, you know, that's the job of the coach to be able to, like you were saying before, read into the analysis. To try and figure out, you know, maybe what they should be feeling to get the next breakthrough or improvement change. Yeah, yeah, it's too— you can't be too conscious of thinking of these things when you're going 100 kilometers an hour and on a bulletproof icy slope. Right. Yeah. Hey, Ron, what are you playing with? In your own skiing at the moment? This, you know, have you had a couple of days, a few weeks already skiing?

Oh yeah, yeah, I've been out several times.

So when you go out, what are you thinking of?

Uh, what do I think of? You know, it depends on if I'm working on short turns or long or medium turns, long turns, that sort of thing. Uh, last, I think last year I, yeah, for the last year or so I was trying to get my short turns tuned up a little bit, especially my right footer. I just finally figured out that I wasn't quite countered enough early enough in my right— well, I just wasn't countered enough in my turns to the left and had my feet a little too close together. So if I countered a little bit more, got my feet a little bit farther apart, then I was just, I could control my fore-aft pressure better and I wouldn't be too far forward or too far back. I wouldn't lose my tail as much on hard snow. I wouldn't find myself coming out of the turn too far back.

Yeah. That's interesting to to think, because you obviously realized the problem was a fore and aft problem, but the fix was in more of a sort of a lateral rotational plane.

Yeah, a lot of it was, I think, just kind of getting my legs out of each other's way a little bit more. I tend to skew my feet a little closer together. Don't know why, but I just tend to. That helped also. Just making it, getting myself to turn the ski a little bit as I was edging it early in the turn. And I wasn't, I found that I would try and edge it a lot, but I needed to actually twist it a little bit too to make it work right. My right foot's been a problem for a little while. Yeah. I had a back surgery about 12 years ago and the right side of my body hasn't really responded.

Oh, right. Did it affect some of the nerves running down the right side? Yeah, yeah.

Really had. The other thing is I skied some GS the other day and I hadn't skied GS in a couple of years and figured out that I just wasn't— I could go a lot deeper with my hip angulation. Uh, there was— I had a lot more room to, to go. I could just get my inside leg, my inside knee further up into my chest. I could get more inclined into the turn and it would— and maybe and make it hold if I got my hip more into the turn. Just more hip angulation. That would, that would make the ski tighten up enough to support me.

And I'm making tighter turns now. Nice, nice, nice. Are you in a new boot at all this season?

No, I ski in Head boots. I, I've been in the same pair of boots, I think, for maybe 3 years. I just got a new pair of shells. Just because the old ones had faded so much and they looked awful. The new one looks, you know, it's got the new colors, but it's the same shell. Yeah. And I, and I use foam liners, so basically I just kind of move the liners from one shell to the next. Yeah. Yeah. You know, they're— once they're set up right, you know, that— I'm, I'm a big fan of foam liners for myself. I've got a very low volume foot. And even in a, you know, even in a, like a 93mm plug boot, you know, I need to take up space.

So having a full tongue. Yeah. Wow. Wow. Really low volume foot. Yeah. Yeah. No wonder you took to skiing. What's that? I said, no wonder you took to skiing.

Oh, yeah. Yeah. And, uh, Yeah, and, um, you know, the nice thing about having a, having a, a well-shot foam liner is you don't have to tie— you don't have to buckle your boots all that tight because they fit so closely that, you know, you still have all the response you want because the foam is dense and, you know, it doesn't have give to it. But the boot doesn't have to be so tight that you can't articulate your foot a little bit. Yeah. I'm, I'm a big fan, but yeah, it's not for everybody. Not for everybody, for sure.

Yeah, for sure. I was just— this is just on the top of my head, but I was just thinking that that foam kind of fit, you know, really giving you feel around the whole entire foot, would help your body perceive more closed chain kind of movements, you know, whereas the plastic shell is not, you know, you don't get as much coverage surface area pressure sort of feedback through your body. It's just interesting.

Just hadn't thought about that before. Yeah. Yeah, liners, you know, most liners, most stock liners are, you know, from a technical point of view, they're low-pass filters. They, they they suppress high frequencies a lot because the foam is absorbent, you know. Yes. Vibration, you know, that's how the snow talks to you is, you know, with vibrations that come through your feet. Yeah. Having a good fitting boot, and it doesn't necessarily have to be foam, it's just a boot that fits your foot in a pretty positive way and doesn't have a lot of, you know, a thick liner, a thick soft liner. That's great.

I like what you said, like the filters, doesn't have too many kind of filters that you have to run that pressure through before you get the sensations from the snow.

Yeah. What I tell a lot of people is that, you know, A lot of, if you buy a pair of boots that are really comfortable when you first get them, and it's got a big soft liner, uh, it's like listening to music with pillows over your ears. Yeah, literally. You've got this thing that filters out lots of the high frequency, and that's where a lot of the information is.

Yeah, yeah, that's, yeah, very true, very true. Do you know David McPhail?

You know, I've never met Dave McPhail personally. We have corresponded some for probably 20 years, 25 years, and I've seen his blog a few times. He's an interesting guy. He is, yeah.

Yeah, I know a friend of mine works quite closely with him in Canada. And hearing through this friend just some of his ideas is really interesting because he is very much, uh, thinking about that level of things in, in someone's ski boot. You know, the material, just right down to the types of materials the baseboard is made of, you know, will change the, the quality of feedback you you get through it. So yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. It's just really interesting when you get— I mean, you can get a little bit too kind of anal about it, but you know, you can really take it down to a very fine degree. Sure. If you want to.

I know I've talked with World Cup athletes who say that, you know, they use— the difference between their slalom boot and their GS boot is the material cuffs made out of. Because this material works, you know, works better for GS. It's, you know, it's a little smoother. It's not as noisy or something like that. Yeah. Yeah. So they're obviously sensing that. Oh, yeah. Yeah. They're skiing on a very hard surface that creates a lot of vibration. Yeah. I mean, these guys are in another world. Yeah, most of them, their sensitivity to what's going on. Yeah, it's, uh, it's pretty amazing.

Yep. Hey, if you had, uh, one thing, one piece of advice to give to the ski instructors, coaches of the world, would there be one piece of advice you'd, you'd say? You know, like, is this— is there question you get asked, you're like, "God, you guys, like, think about this question before you ask it," you know, like, or a common myth or something that is, that you'd like to bust or? Oh boy.

I mean, there are a lot of myths, but I'd say the most important thing that is that people don't learn from listening, they learn by doing. Most people. Yeah. And rather than explaining to people what's going on and what they should do, if you can give them an exercise or a task or something that they will have to in order to accomplish the task and to get better and better at it, they will have to— their body will have to ski better. Those are the most effective ways I've ever found of working with people. Great. Really good point. Really good point. If you tell somebody, I want you to just make hop turns as fast as you can between here and that spot down there. Just bang, bang, bang, bang, bang, bang, bang. And you do that over and over and over and get it to where it goes faster and faster and faster. They will learn to turn the skis with their feet and their legs and keep their upper bodies quiet. Yeah. And their hands will stop moving. You know, you can tell people to do all that kind of stuff, but if you give them something where the task teaches them how to do it. Or have them ski in terrain, skiing in all kinds of terrain and all kinds of snow, not on perfectly groomed, set up snow all the time. You know, get the mountain to teach people how to ski really. The more you can kind of construct an experience for the skier that will teach them how to ski, the more successful you'll be. And I guess the one other thing I would say is you want to give people something to go away with that they can use to tell how well they're doing. Yes. So in other words, if you get them to feel something, you can get them to feel the ski doing a particular thing and they, and they, you see them, you know, they're, they understand, they get that look of awareness. They get it, oh, I felt that, then they can go off and they can monitor their own skiing and they can seek that feeling. Yep. Basically, that's how—

they need some measure of success, right? They need to know that you feel this or this outcome happens, you're successful. So measure it by that.

Right. And it's not right. And the way to know that it's right is not because I told you it was, not because, oh, I said you did that. Yeah, because then that— Exactly. Yep. You felt yourself do that. Yep.

Because otherwise they're measuring it on what you say all the time. So they can only measure it, then they have to keep you around.

That's right. You know, maybe a ski instructor that's profitable, but ultimately it's not. It's not why we're here. No, we're here so they can go out and get better on their own too.

And then, Ron, have you got any plans to write or publish any more books?

I don't have any plans to write any more paper books. Do you want to write one with me?

Do I want to write one for you?

No, with me, with me. With you. You know, publishing on paper, I think, is— I don't know if I'm willing to put in the time to do that again. Certainly not anything book-length. Magazine stuff, I still write magazine stuff. But I'm trying to think about what I can do with video technology and animation. To convey things that are hard for people to understand. For a number of years, I worked at the University of Colorado in a group that— a research group that studied how to teach physics. There's a group in the physics department, how to teach physics to non-majors, non-science majors, you know, people who don't have technical backgrounds, don't understand math, are scared by physics. And there's a lot of successful ways to approach that. And one of the things that works a lot for that is writing certain kinds of computer simulations that people can manipulate helps them understand things that are very hard to understand otherwise. And I would, you know, I've been thinking about maybe revisiting that kind of an approach to producing some sort of electronic media to— Yeah, sounds fantastic. Yeah, who knows if I will or not, or if it will be successful.

But there was some, it was quite successful, the outcomes of teaching in that year. Yeah, just made it more accessible and easy to understand.

Yeah, it's really a widely thought— oh, is my battery dead? My phone died. Oh, no worries.

No worries, no worries, that's all good. I was just doing a bit of a— because my program keeps recording, so I just did a bit of a sort of a wrap-up Anyway, I was just going to say thanks very much for your time and your thoughts and sharing just some information with the people out there.

Yeah. If you want to see some of the physics simulations we did, they're still there. Yeah, if you just Google P-H-E-T, PHET, Physics Education Technology, at the University of Colorado. Okay, you'll see a whole bunch of physics simulations. Oh yeah, some of which—

found it. Yep, FET simulations. Yeah, cool. Okay, so possibly down the line something like that, that would be, um, that would be, uh, awesome. Yeah, yeah, maybe.

Yeah, yeah, it was great talking to you.

Yeah, yeah, really nice to know you.

Are you in Australia right now?

I am, yeah, I am. I used to spend a lot of time, I spent almost 11 years doing back-to-back winters between the Southern Hemisphere and the Northern Hemisphere in places like Utah and Canada, a lot of time in Canada. And now I sort of combine a little bit of that, so I did some coaching in New Zealand and Thredbo, Australia this year. Did some ski holidays to Canada. Yeah, so I'm still trying to keep my sort of foot in the game quite a bit, but also have a job that supports a new family. I've just got a 7-week-old son now, so it's a construction. As an Australian, it's a bit harder than it is, you know, for Europeans, say.

We used to have a lot of Australians around here until the visa situation changed. Yeah, yeah, it's a shame. But I still know some, you know, Richard Jameson? Yeah, yep. Know him? Yeah, Richard, yeah. And Heidi Edlinger. Do you know a guy named Tony, Ian Bruce? I know of Ian.

Yeah, he was sort of around in the APSI a bit before I got involved.

Yeah, I worked with him at Beaver Creek for a number of years. I know you see him pretty, you know, several times a year.

Yeah, and the other person I think I've chatted to, you've had some chats with, is Russ Wood from Whistler. Oh yeah, yeah, yeah. So I'm actually going over to Whistler to do some talks with and some on-snow training with some of his trainers this, this January. So yeah, we're really looking forward to sort of sharing, sharing some of my ideas with him. He's really a really cool guy, fantastic skier. Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. He speaks very highly of you.

Oh yeah, say hi to him for me. And if you see Natalie too, say hi to her.

Yeah, I will, I will. Alright, well, I'd better let you go, and thanks very much again, Ron. And yeah, look forward to maybe meeting you in person one day and writing that book.

Yeah, okay. Well, you know, if you got a strong idea, send it to me, you know.

Yeah, yeah, okay, well, I might do that. It's something I'd like to do. I want to— I mean, I just find it's hard to get all your ideas down in one place and you know, you kind of need also a bit of a sounding board to keep the crazy stuff, you know, contained. So yeah, you might get an email from me one day.

You know, my recommendation is just don't worry about how it looks when you write it the first time and just get it all out there and then, you know, chop it up and move it around and try and put it into a form that makes sense. Yeah, you know, the only way to get it done is to start. And for me personally, the most important thing, the hardest, and maybe the— I think the critical thing is to figure out how to organize it all so that, you know, it's got some structure that hangs together and can make some sense. You know, a stream, 200 pages of stream of consciousness doesn't work, you know. Yeah, yeah, yeah, no, that's right.

Yeah, it's got to, got to have a bit of a process, a logical progression. Yeah, group together. Um, fantastic. All right, yeah, thanks very much, Ron. Look forward to catching up one day. Take care. Okay, bye, Tom. Bye.

This episode is brought to you by Carv, the digital ski coach. Now, one of the features I've had the most fun with all time is is simply the fact that Carv tracks every single turn you make. I treat it a bit like Strava, so at the end of the day it tells me exactly how many turns I've done, and those numbers keep adding up across the season. So last season in Australia, I had a few days where I was doing nearly 2,500 turns, and my legs were tired, but it was really cool to try and have that number there motivating me. And I'm quietly working my way towards my 1 millionth turn with Carv. So the other metrics I've been diving into lately, and these are new for this season, are very unique, and these are turn corridor and turn radius. And I don't see many skiers using them, but they tell you a lot about the shape and flow of your skiing. So the turn corridor shows you how far you're traveling across the hill, or the time almost between apex to apex, and how long you're taking to transition. While the turn radius measures the actual arc you create once you start turn. So these can be different, you can have like a very wide corridor, say 18 meters, but a lower turn radius, or the other way around. So when you compare the two, it opens up a whole world of experimentation, and it would be a bit like a race coach will set different types of race courses to influence a racer or skier to change the timing and mix it up. So I encourage you to look into this if you've got Carv and play with it and see if you can manipulate it, because it's only going to improve your versatility. So I keep my Carv on my boots every single day because you never know quite know when like a change in technique or a new ski resort or skis will show up in the numbers. And it's great at the end of the day being able to check that, or even after the fact. And I'm really looking forward to the day I open the app and I see turn number 1 million. So if you want to explore your skiing in a completely different way, check out Carv, the digital ski coach. And thank you team for sponsoring this episode.