Older skiers: Concentrate!

As we grow older, falling is becoming less of an attractive option, particularly when we ski. Job number-one quickly becomes staying on top of the skis at all cost, with added focus, attention and over all, concentration.

Just like our friends Mikaela Shiffrin and Marcel Hirscher do when they win races. Simple, easy and effective. So, welcome to the “concentration club!”

Dynastar's mustache

If you are a serious skier, you must know Dynastar skis and you may have noticed the famous “mustache” that serves as its logo. If you have and are reasonably curious you might have asked yourself why a
mustache?

The answer is complicated and is in fact related to the place where that ski company was founded and still is headquartered.

The town is Sallanches, in the northern French Alps, a small city of 16,000 people, facing Mt. Blanc and with a coat of arms that depicts the meeting point between two of its brooks, one called Frasse and the other Sallanche, both forming a “V” at their confluence.

This has been seen by some as a “V” for victory or as the symbol of the massive mountain that frames the valley. At the turn of the century, the term "mustache" has been abandoned in favor of "peak" that stands for the mountains surrounding Sallanches and the towering Mt. Blanc in particular.

Well, I suspect that Mr. Claude Joseph, one of the founder of the ski brand who was also extremely creative in the branding department (i.e. Dynastar = Dynamic + Starflex), turned that “V” on its head and voilà!, the famous Dynastar mustache was born!

Skiing: A never ending discovery

Currently, ski conditions are awful with temperatures in the 50s by the early afternoon. I know it's called spring skiing, but it may be a bit premature.

While I can do a few “groomers” to fill some of my time on the slopes, I never stop looking for fringe runs, special stashes, or tricks itinerary that I never get a chance to explore when conditions are normal or great, or because I simply didn't know they even existed.

That way, I keep on adding my knowledge, my experience and my world of skiing. I always learn something new and never, ever get bored on skis...

When lights go down on the ski run...

Park City is one of the few ski resorts that offers daily night skiing almost all season. The lighting infrastructure is not limited to the Paday and First Time lifts, but sometimes it's slalom hill as well as Payday is also lighted to permit morning training for the local ski teams and masters.

For the first time since we have lived in Park City in more than 30 years, my wife caught the very moment the lights went down on the Park City run at 7:02 pm while we were having dinner.

That right; just a fleeting moment that we had never got the chance to observe. Since we've never caught that moment before, for the next following nights we followed the precise event unfolding and last night I even shot a video to immortalize it for good!

Lost passport

Yesterday, as my wife and I were walking in the neighborhood, I noticed what looked like a passport in the gutter, not far from our home. When I picked up the object, it was indeed a Mexican passport belonging to a 35 year old man.

At first I wondered where I should turn the document, given the current tensions about immigration. I noticed that the passport had been stamped by the Mexican Consulate in Salt Lake which I took as a positive sign.

I then called the Park City Police and was assured that there was absolutely no risk for that individual if he came to retrieve it in person, so I dropped it at their office this morning, on our way to ski.

Hopefully the passport and its owner will be reunited sooner than later!

The secret of ski racing

In recent years and particularly this season, alpine technical events have become the confluence of lightness, speed and concentration, best evidenced by athletes like Mikaela Shiffrin and Marcel Hirscher.

Lightness, because the winning skiers must glide as much as possible and not “hurt” the snow by edging to hard of swinging their weight too much from the neutral position.

Speed, because of course, going faster is the mean to the end of victory.

Finally, concentration is key. It must be present moments before the start, to chase any bit of fear or apprehension, and stay on through the finish line without any little, tiny gap at all.

Just one lapse and victory may be over. This means, in GS or Slalom, around a full minute of pure, uninterrupted concentration on average.

Much, much harder to keep up than most of us would think, but by far the paramount ingredient in great skiing and at the same time the open secret of skiing success!

Ski helmets in America...

I've already been wearing a helmet for seven winter seasons. Today, I can't go skiing without one. When I speak to my French friends, they often equate wearing one with high-speed and reckless skiing.

I don't share that view and instead, see many advantages to wearing one, but I could also add that I didn't start wearing one for necessarily the good reasons.

When I began, during the 2010-11 season, it was to stick my GoPro video camera on it, but I soon discovered that it kept my head warm, no matter how cold the weather was and that it was a convenient receptacle for my goggles, my gloves and balaclava so I never forgot one of these important components on my way to ski.

True, safety wasn't on my list. Since that time, helmets have made huge gains in popularity among snow sport practitioners.

On Monday, as I was riding the chairlift in Park City, I conducted two very informal but telling surveys. I simply counted the folks that wore helmet vs. hats who were skiing below me (it was too cold to ski without any headgear).

Out of two counts, my observations yielded a solid 90% wearing hard-hats!