Tandem Skiing

I took a lesson some 20 or so years ago in Boyne Michigan on December 11 one year. One full day was devoted toward practicing tandem skiing for the entire day. I’m going to give you parts of that lesson now in this article. It was a lot of fun and the skills set helps the brain learn how to ski better.

Tandem skiing is the process of two or more people going down a hill side by side making all their turns exactly at the same time while staying together and in a V shape line sort of the way geese fly North for the winter.

 

The five of us on our Holiday Valley ski trip the end of this February can practice skiing tandem with me at the centre, two ladies on each side of me, immediately to my right and left and will be a little bit behind me and the next two ladies will be on the outsides of those ladies one on each side and a little bit behind them.

 

We all now have to learn how to control our speed. We do this by completing our carves so the skis turn up hill a little more in order to slow down, and carving less so the skis stay more downhill in order to speed up.

When one is on a bicycle and one wants to go faster they press harder with their feet one foot then the other. When you ski you do the same thing you press on one foot starting the pressure on the uphill ski and completing it in the carve on the downhill skiing. The more you press though the more the ski carves and points you uphill and that slows you. So, in skiing the harder you press the slower you go. Whereas in bicycling it’s the opposite.

All the while your bodyweight is forward on the balls of your feet not your heels, your hands are up in front of you in your vision field, and pointing down the hill where your shoulders are pointing, and your upper body is staying quiet in relation to the fall line of the hill while your body’s vertical axis is perpendicular to the slope of the hill.

 

Thus, if the trail is very steep you need to have a poll out when it taps because you’re then going to ski around it but you’re leaning down the hill so much on a steep hill that you’ll fall over if you don’t put your poll out for balance. On these small kinds of hills we have around here like in Holiday Valley and Blue Mountain, you don’t really need poles anywhere at anytime, but it’s nice to practice the tapping and skiing around the pole just to get used to it and train yourself for the deep and steep experience coming sometime in the future.

 

Powder snow is a whole other ball game, and requires a different type of ski technique. When I skied Heavenly Valley at Lake Tahoe sometime back, it snowed 7 feet in four days and I had to take powder lessons every day in order to be able to ski there. I never saw Lake Tahoe until the Thursday due to blizzards. That trip was the second time in my life that I had a peak experience when I followed the rules an instructor gave me and it was a great feeling.

 

The first time I had a peak experience was in sailboat racing on a Viking 28 foot class keelboat at night from Niagara on the Lake back to Hamilton on my shift at 3 am. I can tell you that story at another time. We lost that race through a stupid blunder, but the peak experience is memorialized in my memory and so, not easily forgotten.