Saturday Littleton roll

We were missing our fearless leader, Frank, since he couldn't come, but luckily, we know the drill, and Andy was there to make sure we had some leadership. I was skiing in the group with Cate, Hannah, Chris (a visit from a college skier! woo!), Bob, Peter, and Alfred, with a couple other masters joining the group in the beginning. We had some fun conversations, and worked a lot on technique. This is a good time of year to be doing a lot of no pole skiing, so we did lots of that, most noticeably up the hills. If I had a dollar for every time Cate asked "Can we use our poles now?" I'd be rolling in dough, enough for at least one more cup of coffee.

One of the things we were working on is V2 alternate: a lot of people, after poling, bring their chests back up to standing almost immediately, and then they swing their arms forward. This almost looks like you're doing it right, since you can have a big armswing, but really, you want to use your arms to bring your chest up. Its all about momentum. If your chest is already in the "up" position, you're missing out on all that potential energy of actually bringing it up with your arms, in one motion. So, the drill we were practicing was exaggerating the "down" phase of V2-alt. Then on the up-swing, EVERYTHING comes up together - chest and arms, in one motion. See the masterpiece below for the visual explanation:


This makes it a much more powerful stride. It feels weird at first, but its worth fiddling with your V2alt technique...