I was skiing today in *very* icy conditions, and quite crowded slopes. By icy conditions I here refer to the icy bottom of the slope, that was built with machine snow when the season started. Now, when the temperatures have been over 0 for some weeks, all the "real" snow has almost vanished, and what's left is a really hard surface, kind of like blue ice.
Spending most of the day on the black runs, I quickly discovered that I wasn't able to carve under these conditions. Maybe if the traffic had not been so huge, I could perhaps been able to carve, but then using larger radius turns. Today, there wasn't room for that. So, in order to keep speed under control, while travelling in a quite narrow corridor, I experimented with very short turns containing quite a lot of brushing/smearing. I still tried to be very focused on the release, using SuperPhantom, and also focusing on tipping and maintaining the free ski at same angles, and keeping a narrow stance. I also tried to "reach" quite far down the fall line with my pole plants.
In the early part of the turn, I focused on keeping weight forwards on the skis, but I also noticed that to finish the turn, it was helpful to move back a little bit on the skis, and to do a slight push with the heels. Furthermore, I noticed that executing this type of turns was easier if I bent my knees more, i.e not standing "very tall" at all, this seemed to prevent the stance ski from slipping out of control on the ice.
To some extent (without any further comparison! I'd say that the turns I executed bear some similarity with the one-foot and two foot release exercise in video #2, where Harald links very short turns, almost pivoting the skis around in place, carrying very little speed.
Now, what concerns me is that what I tried to describe above, sounds a lot like the traditional skidding techique, i.e. not very PMTS-ish at all....?
Using the "technique" as described above, I was able to negociate the fairly tricky conditions (lots of people were falling all around, or frozen still!) without much problems, but I'm somewhat worried about whether I've been putting non-PMTS movements into my muscle memory today.
I'd appreciate any comments from the forum on this.
Cheers,
Tommy