Monday 25 March 2013

Back at the coalface


I only just realised that the last time I blogged was 6 Feb.  Since then, I have been teaching non-stop for 4-weeks, followed up by 2-weeks of BASI level-3 exams.  Looking at my calendar, today is the first time since the start of February that I’ve been off skis.  At the moment, there isn’t a part of me that doesn’t ache. 
celebrating L4 exams

The way that the English speaking work has come in this year (all in one long period of consecutive weeks) meant that I didn’t really have that much time for ski training in preparation for my Level-3 exams.  They only way that I could practice was to snatch a few runs after work with Ben, my mate at the ski school, who was also due to take his level-4 exams.  So after work we would go for a quick hour and ski-2 runs of short turns, 2-runs of long turns and 2-runs of bumps.  I guess this made for focused and precise training as we both passed our exams!
Bens success is a bigger achievement than mine, as the technical level-4 exam is the highest one in the BASI system and not many people get to that level (there are only something like 350 full BASI level 4 skiers in the system).  Ben won’t mind me saying this but up until we started training, he was skiing shit but he is kind of mercurial and he obviously pulled enough performance out to impress the right people.  I also think that he got an examiner that appreciated the scruffy, womanising, drinking model of ski instructor that he is..
The week after, I went to my own technical skiing exam.  I got lucky with my group and there were some excellent skiers in my group who very much dragged the group onwards and upwards, especially in the moguls which you may remember I was not happy with.  We also had an excellent trainer, a guy called Andi McCann, who knew an incredible amount about how the body worked and how to get the best out of it. 
The low pass rate of 7/16 on the level-3 course reflected that the exams become tougher at this level.  Personally, I didn’t feel THAT challenged (which is going to sound horribly arrogant) and this gives me confidence to see how far I can take my skiing.
destressing during the L3 teach
Following a huge hangover on the Saturday morning, the following week was the level-3 teaching exam, which again was challenging.  We had to teach our peers during this week and I felt that a lot of people mistook doing drills as teaching and didn’t really understand enough about the subject they were teaching to teach it well.  This really showed up at times during the week.  Again, I felt confident on this exam and only had to teach 4-sessions during the week and got given Friday off.  The standard again was a fairly high bar, with 10/15 passing.  (For those of you that I know who will read this on FB or whatever, I'm not trying to be a prick, I'm just being honest.)
Following another exam success hangover, we are back into the real world of teaching, a far cry from the high speed larking about of the last two weeks. 

Today I had 17-beginners scattered around the magic carpet in the fog…