Hi all! I started skiing in January of this year. I started out by renting a pair of shorter skis on my first day. I found them to be easy to control, but as I got to steeper terrain and got moving faster I found them to feel unstable and had a lot of wobbling of the skis back and forth. My next trip out I demo'd a pair of Head Absolut Joy's at 158cm (I'm 5'8" and around 140lbs). I ended up picking up a pair of these and have been skiing on them for this past season (about 20-25 trips to the slopes this year).
I've found that I tend to struggle with turn control at slower speeds. On the days/runs that I can just let myself relax and build up some momentum I move from feeling like an awkward duckling with too-big feet when trying to push the skis around to feeling like everything is just flowing and leaving some nice S-shaped curves behind me. I'm still working on being more consistent with parallel turns and have just started to get a feel for rolling my skis on edge for turns. All of this works well on harder slopes / groomers (and once I get up to a certain amount of speed), but everything seems to fall apart if I'm moving too slowly, the slopes are choppy, or (as I've recently discovered) the slopes are slushy due to spring weather. I expect a large part of my issue is me being inexperienced and needing to learn, but at the same time I'm wondering if my gear isn't as well-suited to some conditions and that may be hampering me in being able to be comfortable and learn at those slower speeds or in messy snow?
Just picked up a spring pass for Killington last night, so I expect to see a lot of messy snow over the next few weeks. Any advice on things to try, or skis to look at if that might help, would be really appreciated!
I've found that I tend to struggle with turn control at slower speeds. On the days/runs that I can just let myself relax and build up some momentum I move from feeling like an awkward duckling with too-big feet when trying to push the skis around to feeling like everything is just flowing and leaving some nice S-shaped curves behind me. I'm still working on being more consistent with parallel turns and have just started to get a feel for rolling my skis on edge for turns. All of this works well on harder slopes / groomers (and once I get up to a certain amount of speed), but everything seems to fall apart if I'm moving too slowly, the slopes are choppy, or (as I've recently discovered) the slopes are slushy due to spring weather. I expect a large part of my issue is me being inexperienced and needing to learn, but at the same time I'm wondering if my gear isn't as well-suited to some conditions and that may be hampering me in being able to be comfortable and learn at those slower speeds or in messy snow?
Just picked up a spring pass for Killington last night, so I expect to see a lot of messy snow over the next few weeks. Any advice on things to try, or skis to look at if that might help, would be really appreciated!