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.
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| 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.
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| 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…
